I was initially thinking about a module that would generate and execute every possible piece of Perl code when it was loaded. Such a module would be very useful, because once you loaded it, you wouldn't have to actually run your program; it would already have done whatever it was that you wanted.

As a first cut, I wrote:

   $s = "a";  while (length($s) < 100) { eval $s; $s++ }

[download]
realizing that this wasn't going to be what I wanted, because it doesn't generate any code with spaces or punctuation, but I thought it might be fun, at least as a joke. It looks like it is going to take a long time to execute, so I ran it with some fear that it might crash my machine or do something else bad.

But actually it executes rather quickly, and nothing bad happens. As I said, it was not the disaster I expected.

Can you predict the results?

--
Mark Dominus
Higher-Order Perl

In reply to This turned out not to be the disaster I expected by Dominus

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.