Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl.moderated,comp.lang.perl.misc Subject: Re: So what do YOU use Perl for? References: <3ACFB415.63D2CA91@gmu.edu> Organization: Plover Systems Co. From: mjd@plover.com (Mark Jason Dominus) Message-ID: <3ad60451.2149$21a@news.op.net> In article , Gwyn Judd wrote: > >I use it to impress women. > Around 1993 or 1994 I started dating a woman who was a quilter. After seeing a lot of quilts and pictures of quilts, it seemed to me that most quilters stuck to a few traditional quilt blocks and that there might be a lot of quilt blocks that were rarely used. I wrote a suite of Perl programs to generate all the quilt blocks of a certain type (sixteen-patch half-square triangles with 90-degree rotational symmetry) and printed out the result: http://www.plover.com/~mjd/misc/quilt/composites/bindexs.jpg (I made an error; one block appears twice. Can you find it?) I was delighted, because the results confirmed my suspicion: There *are* a lot of excellent but rarely-seen quilt blocks. I was delighted even further when we got married, she made the program output into a real quilt and gave it to me as a wedding present. http://www.plover.com/~mjd/misc/quilt/quilt/ She must have been impressed. -- @P=split//,".URRUU\c8R";@d=split//,"\nrekcah xinU / lreP rehtona tsuJ";sub p{ @p{"r$p","u$p"}=(P,P);pipe"r$p","u$p";++$p;($q*=2)+=$f=!fork;map{$P=$P[$f^ord ($p{$_})&6];$p{$_}=/ ^$P/ix?$P:close$_}keys%p}p;p;p;p;p;map{$p{$_}=~/^[P.]/&& close$_}%p;wait until$?;map{/^r/&&<$_>}%p;$_=$d[$q];sleep rand(2)if/\S/;print