We had a great meeting last night! Twelve people came for our look at three different ways of doing text animation with ANSI control sequences, which also generated lots of interesting tangents.
I did a walk-through of John Norton's Spiro JAPH script, which draws text-based lissajous figures. It uses the cursor home sequence to set the absolute cursor position. John answered questions about the math, and we discovered a bug in B::Deparse and noted that the implementation of qw// changed in perl5.6. Uri then presented his recursive maze-solving script. It uses `tput` to print the home and clear sequences, redrawing the screen each iteration. Uri also mentioned a puzzle involving finding palindromes, and showed us a regex that matches a string of letters if and only if it can be broken up into a sequence of words (e.g. "catdog" would be matched, but "catdogq" would not). (?!) is used to control backtracking; perl6 will have an explicit FAIL directive. I followed up with a quick look at my own iterative maze-solving script. It uses the cursor up/down/left/right sequences to move the cursor around, changing a single character each iteration. I explained how I used s///e for flow control in the golfed version of the script, and we discussed the implications of bare blocks, do blocks, and redo. Other topics that came up included subroutine prototypes, deep recursion, and PUGS. Next month's meeting will be on Tuesday, December 13. Ronald P.S. Ian, I updated my maze script for your suggestion of moving the cursor back before pausing, rather than after. Not only does the animation look nicer now, but it happened to save a character too! :D _______________________________________________ Boston-pm mailing list [email protected] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
