Heh - well, if nothing else, your intended approach embraces the 3 virtues of a perl programmer...

Beyond what others have said, it's worth mentioning that you are not required to bar code every item - a catalog of items with their bar codes at each till might be a better approach - particularly if your 2000 items are actually 100 items in 20 different colours (i.e. maintain bar codes for the 100 items with separate bar codes for the colours).

map{$a=1-$_/10;map{$d=$a;$e=$b=$_/20-2;map{($d,$e)=(2*$d*$e+$a,$e**2
-$d**2+$b);$c=$d**2+$e**2>4?$d=8:_}1..50;print$c}0..59;print$/}0..20
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