First of all, welcome to the OC jfredett.

Not every JAPH has to be obfuscated and I like where you are going with this. I think some perlism would improve it though. Removing parens and the close statement ( perl doesn't need them.)

$Just = 'foo'; open(JAPH, $Just); @another = split(/\s/, <JAPH>); $Per
+l = ""; $h
acker =",";
$Perl =join " ",(substr $another[0],1),(substr $another[5],1),(substr 
+$another[9
],1),(substr $another[12],1);
print $Perl . $hacker;
[download]

$Just = 'foo'; open(JAPH, $Just); @another = split(/\s/, <JAPH>); $Per
+l = ""; $h
acker =","; sub Just { substr shift, 1 };
$Perl =join " ", Just($another[0]), Just($another[5]), Just($another[9
+]), Just (
$another[12]);
print $Perl . $hacker;
[download]

$Just = 'foo'; open JAPH, $Just; @another = split /\s/, <JAPH>; $Perl 
+= ""; $hac
ker =","; sub
Just {  substr shift, 1 };   $Perl = join " ", Just ($another[0]), Jus
+t($
another [6]),  Just($another [11]),  Just ($another [14]); print $
Perl    .$
hacker,
[download]

so- let me make sure I'm getting all of this. Perl is alot to learn all at once... :)
1) just curious, but does $0 == 'foo' on unix? that is to say will 'foo' will open the source file? or is that just a dummy var because unix doesn't have that capability?
2) I take it that perl doesn't require parens, so open J, $k == open(J, $k); I also infer from what you said (and wrote) that no parens is the norm for built in calls, but use parens for user defined function calls.
EDIT: Reading your post again, its terribly obvious that perl doesnt require parens, it's so obvious mostly because you said so, in smallish black print... so yah, question answered. mostly. /EDIT
3) I like the sound of the Just($another x) calls, the repitition makes that final line of $Perl . $hacker work even better than before.

Hopefully my newb isn't showing too much. But I definitely learned something. Thanks!

~~Joe

I played w/ the whitespace some more, and also did a neat thing with the $Perl variable. Here's the code:

 
$Just = $0; open JAPH,$Just; @another = split /\s/, <JAPH>; $Perl = " 
+";  $hacker = ","; sub Just { substr shift , 1 };
$Perl = join $Perl, Just ($another[0]), Just ($another[5]), Just ($ano
+ther[10]), Just ($another[15]); print $Perl . $hacker,
[download]

I set the $Perl variable to a whitespace, which makes it so you can fit the whole thing on just two lines. Then I played with the whitespace enough so that the words for "Just another Perl Hacker," are on spaces of multiple 5. Since now its a simple loop. Here's a shorter version:

$Just = $0; open JAPH,$Just; @another = split /\s/, <JAPH>; $Perl = " 
+";  $hacker =",";sub Just {substr shift,1};
for($hack = 15; $hack > -1 ; $hack -= 5){$hacker = Just($another[$hack
+]) . $Perl . $hacker};$hacker =~ s/\s,/,/s;
print Just $Perl.$hacker,
[download]

254 characters. not bad, right? I think thats in the canonical limits.
Japhs are fun :-)
~Joe

No jfredett, nothing fancy with the 'foo' which is just the name of file in which I saved the script. On unix, $0 just returns 'perl' not the path of the running script like on Windose. So I'm just doing a direct 'open' on my script to read the source.

Parens in perl is a list operator. They say package these item up as a list. If you already have a list, say in a $scalar or returned from a function call, then using parens is redundent. Arguments to function call also are passed as a list so when you say "print $a, $b" perl knows you mean "pass a list consisting of $a followed by $b". And will try very hard to make sense of your code. But perl would get confused if we used this inside another list such as "join ' ', print $a, $b , $some_other_stuff". How would perl know if $some_other_stuff went with "join" or "print"? So sometime we have to use parens to be clear to perl what we mean. But I look at a lot of the code here on perlmonks you'll see that for simple statements parens are often not used.

We all learn perl in smallish bites so hang in there.

---

s//----->\t/;$~="JAPH";s//\r<$~~/;{s|~$~-|-~$~|||s |-$~~|$~~-|||s,<$~~,<~$~,,s,~$~>,$~~>,, $|=1,select$,,$,,$,,1e-1;print;redo}