Thanks for the comments and the effort placed in producing a new solution for the Kris Kringle script. I should have checked the return of the open statement of course - I almost always do after months of seeing that very comment in comp.lang.per.misc.

Anyway, just a note to say that my solution, or code rather, doesn't have the problem you mention at the end, but it was good to point it out. I've never had the problem after substantial testing.

This script is interesting, I think, as it is typical of scripts that must work first time, and you cannot really test it over and over with real data as you don't want to bug people with junk email. I normally approach this type of problem with writing to files and the writing another Perl program to test.

All programming style asside ...

The main difference between our solutions it that your approach just loops again if you randomly choose yourself and my approach is to remove yourself from the list before you choose. In theory (extrapolating here) you could get caught in a infinite loop if the random assignment returned yourself every time. I was just removing that possibility of ever occurring. My approach also removes the people already selected from the list so that they are not selected again.

I think that I will make a few runs of the programs available with different data sets to show people interested in the workings how it performs over data etc. What do people think?

Regards, Marburg (john.keating@may.ie)

In reply to RE: RE: Kris Kringle Script by Marburg
in thread Kris Kringle Script by Marburg

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