in reply to hangman question

$#letters is the index of the last element in @letters (or -1 if there are no elements). $blankword[$i] accesses the element at index $i of @blankword. The loop foreach $i (0..$#letters) {...} prints each of the known letters in the word and prints a '-' for any unknown letters. The if ($blankword[$i]) tests to see if a letter is known or unknown by testing to see if the element is zero or not.

In scalar context @array returns the number of elements in @array (cf $#array above). So $guesses[@guesses]=$guess; assigns $guess to the next unused element in @guesses. It would be more Perlish to push @guesses, $guess instead.

DWIM is Perl's answer to Gödel

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Re^2: hangman question
by convenientstore (Pilgrim) on Jul 16, 2007 at 00:37 UTC
    Hey, thanks for your reply. Further questions on your explanation..
    previsouly, "@blankword" was 0 0 0 (let's say for 3 letter words.. say like ---> n o w

    so going through (0..$#letters), $i gets assigned n
    o
    w
    now, how does $blankwordn equals element is zero or not?
[reply]

      No. $i gets assigned 0, 1 and 2 - indexes into the two arrays, not the contents of the elements of @letters. 0 .. $#letters is the list context range operator and generates a list containing the integers from 0 to the index of the last element in @letters (0, 1 and 2 for this example).

      The code depends on elements of @blankwords being set to 0 until they are assigned a correct letter. The test could be rewritten if ($blankword[$n] eq $letters[$i]) { to make an explicit check that the correct letter has been guessed.

      DWIM is Perl's answer to Gödel
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        I think now I am understanding the script. However, I ended up commenting out the @guesses portion (mainly because I think @guesses is useless part and script still works)..
        Was author wrong to put that code there(since it does nothing?). 
        #!/usr/bin/perl -w

   @words = qw( hi no );
   @guesses=();
   $wrong=0;

   $choice=$words[rand @words];
   $hangman="0-|--<";

  @letters=split(//, $choice);
  print "\@letters is @letters\n";
  @hangman=split(//, $hangman);
  @blankword=(0) x scalar(@letters);
  print "\@blankword is @blankword\n";
  OUTER:
      while ($wrong<@hangman) {
          print "whielloop\n";
          foreach $i (0..$#letters) {
                  if ($blankword[$i]) {
                          print $blankword[$i];
                  } else {
                          print "-";
                  }
          }
          print "\n";
          if ($wrong) {
                  print @hangman[0..$wrong-1]
          }
          print "\n\n\n\n Your Guess: ";
          $guess=<STDIN>;  chomp $guess;
         # foreach(@guesses) {
         #         print "foreach loop\n";
         #         print "\$guess is $guess\n";
         #         print "\$\_ is $_\n";
         #         next OUTER if ($_ eq $guess);
         # }
         # print "\@guesses is @guesses\n";
         # $guess_scalar = "@guesses";
         # print "\$guess_scalar is $guess_scalar\n";
          #$guesses[@guesses]=$guess;
         # push @guesses, $guess;
          $right=0;
          for ($i=0; $i<@letters; $i++) {
                 print "\$i is $i\n";
                 print "in the forloop\n";
                  if ($letters[$i] eq $guess) {
                          $blankword[$i]=$guess;
                           print "\$blankword\[\$i\] is $blankword[$i]
+\n";
                          $right=1;
                  }
          }
          $wrong++ if (not $right);
            print "\$wrong is $wrong\n";
          if (join('', @blankword) eq $choice) {
                  print "IF loop\n";
                  print "You got it right!\n";
                  exit;

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