I guess what I'm trying to say is that you have to be able to break a problem down. I guess I'm biased, already knowing HOW to do this, but I'll use your "print a number padded with 0's" comment. How would I find a way to do this?

• well, decimal numbers don't start with 0's, unless it's just the number 0
• decimal numbers CAN start with a "0." followed by 0's, so I could divide the number by some power of ten, and then remove the leading "0."
• I'm really trying to turn a number into a string with some leading 0's to make it a string of a certain length
• is there some function that will allow me to format a string to my demands?

At that point, I might not know about sprintf and printf. So I would ask: "I want to pad a number with zeroes. Is there a function I can use to format a number like that?" I might be scolded for not checking the documentation and the FAQs, but at least I was able to think through my problem.

But again, I'm biased. Maybe I was just ranting out against all the times something has been so very obvious to me and not to someone else. Perl has given me very clear vision, and I have trouble not expecting everyone else to have such clarity of mind.

$_="goto+F.print+chop;\n=yhpaj";F1:eval

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