in reply to World's Smallest Gif

The approach I like to use for similar tasks is to generate a PPM image file and then pipe the output to ppmtogif, like this:

  $RED = 255;
  $GREEN = 0;
  $BLUE = 0;

  open STDOUT, "| ppmtogif" or die "open: $!";
  # "1 1" means that the image is 1x1 pixel.
  # "255" means that 255 is the maximum color intensity.
  print "P3 1 1 255 $RED $GREEN $BLUE\n";
  close STDOUT or die "close: $!";

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This may not be as cool, and it has the disadvantage of requiring ppmtogif, but it's also a lot simpler, and it has the tremendous advantage that it's easy to generate images that are bigger than one pixel. For example, the images for this article were generated with this technique, as were these.

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Re: Re: World's Smallest Gif
by extremely (Priest) on Dec 29, 2000 at 14:36 UTC
    You wrote a raytracer in perl and you yell at people who want to write a gif encoder in perl and you wrote a raytracer in perl and ... *head explodes*

    =) No offense meant, I watched people for 5-6 years insist that perl should have a perl-only way to create a gif. And for 5-6 years I've told them "That is as stupid as writing a ray-tracer in perl, wrong tool, wrong job." Now I've got to come up with a better "stupid" than ray-tracer. Thanks a lot MJD!

    Update: ++ to mjd below, I laughed when he called a guy in a forum a bozo after the guy argued about GIF's at the second PerlCon. =) Hopefully he knows I'm kidding...

    --
    $you = new YOU;
    honk() if $you->love(perl)

[reply]
      Says extremely:
      You wrote a raytracer in perl and you yell at people who want to write a gif encoder in perl
      I didn't yell at anyone. I was just showing another way to do it.

      "That is as stupid as writing a ray-tracer in perl, wrong tool, wrong job."
      But it is stupid. It was a terrible ray tracer. Perl is too slow to write a good ray tracer.
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In Section Cool Uses for Perl