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Dear fellow monks!
Above is an exemplary output of my perl poetry generator, a small piece of code I wrote to learn about multi-dimensional arrays and Win32::OLE::Excel.
It is a port of a Pascal-program I created ~20 years ago ... any hint on how may I make it more "perlish"?
best regards
Rata

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use Win32::OLE qw(in with);
use Win32::OLE::Const 'Microsoft Excel';

my $Excel = Win32::OLE->new('Excel.Application', 'Quit'); 
my $sheet = $Excel->Workbooks->Open($ARGV[0])->Sheets->item("words"); 
+  # note to myself: add error handling here!

my @words;
foreach my $col('A'..'F')
{
   my $row=1; my @list = (); my @value = ();
   do { @value= $sheet->Range("$col".$row++)->{'Value'}; 
        if (defined ($value[0])) { push (@list, $value[0]); } 
   } while(defined ($value[0]));
   push (@words, \@list);
 }
my $rhyme = int(rand( scalar(@{$words[4]}) ));

my $poem = $words[0][int(rand( scalar(@{$words[0]})))]." are ".$words[
+1][int(rand( scalar(@{$words[1]})))]." ".$words[2][int(rand( scalar(@
+{$words[2]})))]."?\n".
           "They're ".$words[2][int(rand( scalar(@{$words[2]})))]." an
+d ".$words[2][int(rand( scalar(@{$words[2]})))]." ".$words[4][$rhyme]
+.".\n".
           "And ".$words[2][int(rand( scalar(@{$words[2]})))]." and ".
+$words[2][int(rand( scalar(@{$words[2]})))]." and ".$words[2][int(ran
+d( scalar(@{$words[2]})))].",\n".
           "Cause ".$words[2][int(rand( scalar(@{$words[2]})))]." ".$w
+ords[3][int(rand( scalar(@{$words[3]})))]." ".$words[5][$rhyme]."!\n"
+;

print ("$poem\n");
$Excel->Speech->speak($poem);   # let us hear it!
exit 0;

#Provide the name of an Excel-file as parameter!
#Excel content (in a sheet called "words"):
#
#  A           B         C        D           E           F
#Why    the PerlMonks coding   perl wisdom  in vain    is pain
#Where  the people    hacking  c-sharp      like none  is fun
#How    the fanboys   smiling  unix         so fine    takes time
#       great coders  thinking posix        
#       small thinkerslearning shell scripts        
#       code monkeys  asking   java        
#                     writing            
#                     pasting            
#                     ...

[download]

In reply to poetry generator (playing with Win32::OLE::Excel ) by Ratazong

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