Hey Guys,
I am a real beginner so at the risk of being slammed by some, I wanted to
get some input.
I was trying to do exercise 5 of the 5th edition of learning perl:
It is based on exercise 4, so I will paste both here:
4. [10] Write a subroutine, named greet, that welcomes the person you name
by
telling them the name of the last person it greeted:
greet( "Fred" );
greet( "Barney" );
This sequence of statements should print:
Hi Fred! You are the first one here!
Hi Barney! Fred is also here!
5. [10] Modify the previous program to tell each new person the names of all
of the
people it has previously greeted:
greet( "Fred" );
greet( "Barney" );
greet( "Wilma" );
greet( "Betty" );
This sequence of statements should print:
Hi Fred! You are the first one here!
Hi Barney! I've seen: Fred
Hi Wilma! I've seen: Fred Barney
Hi Betty! I've seen: Fred Barney Wilma
So I worked on it for a while and got something really close to what is in
the answers, but what you get as an output is grammatically incorrect, it is
missing the commas and such. I figured that in reality, eventually in the
real world, I would want the output to be correct or at least tab delimited.
So I went about trying to get commas in and I came up with this:
! /usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use 5.010;
sub greet {
state @people;
my $name = shift @_;
print "Hi $name! ";
if (@people){
my @peoplec = @people;
my $lastperson = shift @peoplec;
my $beforelast = shift @peoplec;
print "I've seen: ";
foreach (@peoplec){
print "$_, ";}
print "$beforelast and ";
print"$lastperson!\n";
}
else {
print "You are the first here!\n";
}
push @people, $name;
}
&greet ("Fred");
&greet ("Barney");
&greet ("Wilma");
&greet ("Betty");
&greet ("Bamm-Bamm");
exit;
I am no perl expert, but this code looks really clunky to me, so I was just
looking for some input. If your input is your code sucks without any
constructive suggestion, please keep it for yourself, since I already know
that my code sucks! :P I am beginner, that's what newbies do, they suck (in
general, some people are brilliant and don't, not my case).
And since I got writing I thought I would chip in the discussion as a real
newbie, from a newcomer perspective. I am a scientist, brutal criticism is
part of my job (both giving it and receiving it), and I personally find it
never gets easier. I agree with many people that if you want to be great,
there is no other way, you have to, as Randall said, get a thick skin.
However, some people are not learning perl to be great, they just want to be
OK. I am one of those. I have been using rudimentary Bio perl scripts to
deal with Genomic data for a while, but never really learned the language,
so I decided to go back to the beginning and learn it from there, from the
ground. I have to say this list is a bit daunting and does not look like a
beginners list at all. I think it, as Cat Stevens would say, a wild world
out there, but some of us are just trying to get by.
That's my view from outside, really outside.
Cheers,
Tiago
--
"Education is not to be used to promote obscurantism." - Theodonius
Dobzhansky.
"Gracias a la vida que me ha dado tanto
Me ha dado el sonido y el abecedario
Con él, las palabras que pienso y declaro
Madre, amigo, hermano
Y luz alumbrando la ruta del alma del que estoy amando
Gracias a la vida que me ha dado tanto
Me ha dado la marcha de mis pies cansados
Con ellos anduve ciudades y charcos
Playas y desiertos, montañas y llanos
Y la casa tuya, tu calle y tu patio"
Violeta Parra - Gracias a la Vida
Tiago S. F. Hori
PhD Candidate - Ocean Science Center-Memorial University of Newfoundland
