I've been losing sleep at nights as I've been trying to rewrite the program World Builder into Perl. There are lots of issues with this, such as 'why bother'? My answers are that (1) because I'm emotionally caught up in the project and I won't sleep until I finish, and (2) that posted listings have serious coding errors as a consequence of mindless scanning of the article. But other than that, the conversion of a 25 year old Basic program into something that resembles sane Perl creates some opportunities to examine interface issues.

The main menu looks something like this:

WORLD BUILDER
1. Known star
2. Create a new star
3. List Known Stars
4. Quit

[download]
Fair enough. I'd like to be able to type '1' here, or '2' here, but I'd also like to be able to type 'KNOWN' or 'Known', or 'known', or any minimal increment of 'known' that is unique and end up in the same place. This has to be a well understood problem, so I'm asking for help here.

Thanks in advance,

David.

In reply to World Builder: the recovery and archeology of old programs. by dwm042

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