I agree that is a very well formed program. But the work that went into it wasn't mine. If you want to put that on the shoulders of one person, that person would probably be Gisle Aas. (Who in turn depended on others.)

That is an amazing thing about programming. People can and do build off of other people's work. I can take that example, read it over the phone to someone, and in a matter of minutes they can tailor it to their needs.

Now people often remark that Perl is known for amazing one-liners. But few ask why it is.

I would argue that it is because Larry Wall did a very good job of reconceptualizing what people need to know to write useful programs, and did a good job of allowing people to contribute to that and then build off of each other's work.

---

---

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! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

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:
	&		&
	<		&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.