On Thu, 16 May 2002, Ryan Russell wrote: > > Does anyone have any hints for someone new at this? It seems like a lot > of the golf relies on less-known side-effects. I'm wondering if someone > has started documenting the tricks. I'm going to need a few hints before > I'm able to read and comprehend some of the winning solutions I've seen so > far. >
Buy the Camel book. Read all of the chapter on all the functions, paying attention to their return values as well as their side effects. Read all of the special variables as well. For the poor, read man perlfunc and man perlvar instead. Try all ways of looping: map before and after, for before and after, eval"something"x$n. Understand the short-circuiting operators && and || Read all the previous competitions, and the discussions that followed them. That should get you started. Unfortunately, to win you'll also need to turn into an alien. -- Stephen Turner, Cambridge, UK http://homepage.ntlworld.com/adelie/stephen/ "This is Henman's 8th Wimbledon, and he's only lost 7 matches." BBC, 2/Jul/01
