I'm surprised that I haven't received more Perl or PHP submissions. I've used both languages a bit and it just seems with the implicit everything and variable variables (woo hoo, another self modifying work), we'd see a bit more of it. With that said, here goes the first (and only) Perl submission from Pope Foo Bar II, illustrating how fun it can be to avoid the built-in length function:
sub strlen ($)
#
# find length of a string. split evaluated in a scalar context
# returns the number of substrings matched. if the expr to split on is null,
# this should return the number of chars in the string.
#
# this function should really
# be put somewhere more centralized and just imported where needed.
{
no warnings; # ignore 'Use of implicit split to @_ is deprecated'
my ($str) = @_;
my $len = scalar(split //, $str);
return $len;
}
On another note, I'm strongly considering switching from .TEXT to another system. I think it'd be great if you could reply to a post as a comment, and be notified when someone replies to your comment (or to the thread). I'm sure I could add that as a feature to .TEXT, but I'm really not up for that.
Any ideas? We definitely would need to keep RSS, as many readers subscribe to the feed.
EDIT: Another nice thing would be able to have the submission form actually post into the system (as opposed to email me), so that the moderator (me) could easily select and and post it.
EDIT2: Don't forget, I'm a Microsoft guy, so I'm going to be hard-pressed to install PHP, MySQL, Apache and whatever else ... I like my .NET! But, I'm definately open to a hosted system too ...