[FWP] Limnophilous (was: The Perl Golf Apocalypse Experience)

[Ilmari Karonen <iltzu@sci.fi>]

On Mon, 14 Aug 2000, Daniel Chetlin wrote:
> On the same subject, I was asked recently to think of a word which had 4
> consecutive letters (like abcd or ghij). Failing miserably to think of one, I
> decided it would be good for golf. The solution I came up with is pretty long,
> and I bet a better one exists, so I'm throwing out the challenge.
> 
> perl -wne 'sub f{chr(ord($1)+pop)};print if/(.)(??{f(1)})(??{f(2)})(??{f(3)})/'
>     /usr/dict/2words

  perl -ne '$"=""; print if /#@{[map+("|",a..z)[0,$_..$_+3], 1..23]}/oi;'
      /usr/dict/word.lst

Removing the /o saves a stroke, but makes it unbearably slow.  The /i may
also be omitted if you use an all-lowercase word list.  Of course the word
list is assumed not to contain any # characters.. 

> BTW, no words that fit that pattern are in the standard Linux /usr/dict/words
> -- I had to use a different word list that I found elsewhere.  But reasonably
> common words that fit do exist.

Ignoring inflected forms, I find the following in YAWL:

  limnophilous
  overstudy
  overstuff
  overstunk
  superstud
  understudy

The fact that 5 out of the 6 contain the same sequence, "rstu", with only
"limnophilous" (anyone with a big dic care to quote a definition?) having
"mnop" seems quite curious.

-- 
Ilmari Karonen - http://www.sci.fi/~iltzu/
"The screwdriver *is* the portable method."  -- Abigail in c.l.p.m



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