Re: [FWP] Drunk driving

[Mark-Jason Dominus <mjd@plover.com>]

> Randal L. Schwartz writes:
> |>>>>> "L" == L  <Brian> writes:
> |L> Actually writing formatted text to a variable. And to be somewhat fair,
> |L> that's about the only way to do it in base perl4.
> |Well, not without forking. :)
> 
> I thought of that, but consider it basically the same as the example given:
> whether the intermediary is a pipe or a temp file, write to some filehandle,
> then read the formatted text. With the temp file you need to clean up the
> file while pipes go away on their own, but forking doesn't work with perls
> that don't fork.

Aha!  This is a *perfect* opportunity to use `the secret passage'.
People who don't know about that yet might enjoy trying running it and
trying to figure out what is going on.  Spoilers are at

	http://www.plover.com/~mjd/perl/LOD/#9 

The following program works but does not use either a temporary file
or `fork':

#!/usr/bin/perl

format OUT = 
@<<<<<<<<< | @|||||||||| | @>>>>>>>>>>          @#####.##
$left,       $center,      $right,              $numeric
.


$numeric = 11;
unless ($ARGV[0] eq 'receive') {
  close STDIN or die "close STDIN: $!";
  pipe(STDIN, OUT) or die "pipe: $!";
  for ($i=0; $i<7; $i++) {
    ($left, $center, $right) = split /\s+/, scalar <DATA>;
    write OUT;
    $numeric *= 2 / 3;
  }
  close OUT;
  exec "./$0 receive";
  die "exec: $!";
}

# Read formatted data from standard input
print  "STDIN $.: $_" while <STDIN>;

__DATA__
In the beginning
God created the
heavens and the
Earth.  The Earth
was without form
and void, and
darkness was upon
the face of 
the deep. 






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