6 ms·

I know. I’m talking about Perl. Try to keep up.

eesmith 3y ago
Do pay attention. You wrote "Prior to Perl doing this was painful.". I highlighted how you contradicted the author's claim that it was easy to do using awk. Awk existed long before Perl.
- ChancyChance 3y ago
  What’s the word for when snark backfires?
  - DonHopkins 3y ago
    snark backfires = barf earns kicks
  - doctor_eval 3y ago
    “Sorry”?
  - hgsgm 3y ago
    krans
- eesmith 3y ago
  As a concrete example, while my awk skills are extremely rusty, here's a program which will normalize the input line, create a table mapping the normalized name to the matching original lines, then at the end it only displays the ones with at least 5 anagrams. I tried to avoid modern awk features, like asort, to be something that would have worked in the 1980s: { # Convert to normal form: # 1. Fold to lower case # 2. Bin the letters to get frequency counts # 3. Only consider lower case ASCII letters split(tolower($0), letters, ""); # Ignore asort() in modern awks and do a bin sort instead. for (i in letters) { c = letters[i]; repeats[c] = repeats[c] c; } normal_form = ""; for (i=97; i<=122; i++) { c = sprintf("%c", i); # no chr() in a 1980s awk normal_form = normal_form repeats[c]; } table[normal_form] = table[normal_form] "," $0 delete repeats; } END { # Only show the ones with at least 5 matches for (i in table) { match_str = table[i]; split(match_str, matches, ","); num_matches = length(matches)-1 if (num_matches >= 5) { # print the number of matches, then the match string printf("%d%s\n", num_matches, match_str); } } } When I try it on a word list I have handy, here are the most common words: % awk -f anagram.awk < words_alpha.txt | sort -n -t, | tail -5 13,elaps,lapse,leaps,lepas,pales,peals,pleas,salep,saple,sepal,slape,spale,speal 14,anestri,antsier,asterin,eranist,nastier,ratines,resiant,restain,retains,retinas,retsina,stainer,starnie,stearin 14,apers,apres,asper,pares,parse,pears,prase,presa,rapes,reaps,repas,spaer,spare,spear 14,arest,aster,astre,rates,reast,resat,serta,stare,strae,tares,tarse,tears,teras,treas 15,alerts,alters,artels,estral,laster,lastre,rastle,ratels,relast,resalt,salter,slater,staler,stelar,talers Certainly Perl is more succinct, though note that even up to Perl 4 in the early 1990s you would need to use the string concatenation method to store the list of matches in the table. But, "painful"? No. Not to someone who knew how to use awk.

Do pay attention. You wrote "Prior to Perl doing this was painful.". I highlighted how you contradicted the author's claim that it was easy to do using awk. Awk existed long before Perl.

ChancyChance 3y ago
What’s the word for when snark backfires?
- DonHopkins 3y ago
  snark backfires = barf earns kicks
- doctor_eval 3y ago
  “Sorry”?
- hgsgm 3y ago
  krans
eesmith 3y ago
As a concrete example, while my awk skills are extremely rusty, here's a program which will normalize the input line, create a table mapping the normalized name to the matching original lines, then at the end it only displays the ones with at least 5 anagrams. I tried to avoid modern awk features, like asort, to be something that would have worked in the 1980s: { # Convert to normal form: # 1. Fold to lower case # 2. Bin the letters to get frequency counts # 3. Only consider lower case ASCII letters split(tolower($0), letters, ""); # Ignore asort() in modern awks and do a bin sort instead. for (i in letters) { c = letters[i]; repeats[c] = repeats[c] c; } normal_form = ""; for (i=97; i<=122; i++) { c = sprintf("%c", i); # no chr() in a 1980s awk normal_form = normal_form repeats[c]; } table[normal_form] = table[normal_form] "," $0 delete repeats; } END { # Only show the ones with at least 5 matches for (i in table) { match_str = table[i]; split(match_str, matches, ","); num_matches = length(matches)-1 if (num_matches >= 5) { # print the number of matches, then the match string printf("%d%s\n", num_matches, match_str); } } } When I try it on a word list I have handy, here are the most common words: % awk -f anagram.awk < words_alpha.txt | sort -n -t, | tail -5 13,elaps,lapse,leaps,lepas,pales,peals,pleas,salep,saple,sepal,slape,spale,speal 14,anestri,antsier,asterin,eranist,nastier,ratines,resiant,restain,retains,retinas,retsina,stainer,starnie,stearin 14,apers,apres,asper,pares,parse,pears,prase,presa,rapes,reaps,repas,spaer,spare,spear 14,arest,aster,astre,rates,reast,resat,serta,stare,strae,tares,tarse,tears,teras,treas 15,alerts,alters,artels,estral,laster,lastre,rastle,ratels,relast,resalt,salter,slater,staler,stelar,talers Certainly Perl is more succinct, though note that even up to Perl 4 in the early 1990s you would need to use the string concatenation method to store the list of matches in the table. But, "painful"? No. Not to someone who knew how to use awk.