Programming

Programming computers was always a hobby, then it became my job for five years, and now it’s a hobby again. For the past decade I have been infatuated with Perl, a powerful and charmingly unorthodox language. This romance is fading, but leaves beautiful memories. I wrote, and (occasionally) maintain, a small clutch of modules. In late 2005, I added a bunch of Perl6-derived features to the Perl 5 interpreter.

Some time ago I proposed a simple extension for regular expression libraries, which allows one to write an expression weakly equivalent to any context-free grammar! The idea was implemented by Philip Hazel in his wonderful PCRE library.

I once tried to apply Oulipo ideas to Perl programming, which resulted in this rather odd program, explained in this talk, which inspired the creation of this bot by a friend of mine.

There is also a short Perl program that converts an instance of the subset-sum problem into a Perl regular expression. (I wrote the code on paper on holiday in Greece, and typed it in when I got home.)