Perl Scripts

Here are a few hacks that have little in common aside from having been written in perl. Perl rules!

SimpleGet.pl: A small stand-alone library defining just the get and getprint routines from LWP::Simple. So you don't have to install 1.5 megs of stuff just to write a one-liner web client.

Here are some examples showing how to use the SimpleGet library.

MIRA: A text-only web browser with some powerful features. I wrote this myself to satisfy my need to search my own browser cache. While I was at it, I decided that all text should be cached permanently. MIRA was the result.

Hypercalc: An unusual calculator program. It represents numbers in a special way allowing the calculation of quantities much larger than tools such as bc, dc, MACSYMA/maxima, Mathematica and Maple, all of which use a bignum library. For example, you can use Hypercalc to determine whether 128^48¹⁰²⁴ is larger than 8^88⁸⁸⁸. I used it to compute many of the examples on my numbers and large numbers page pages.

A Turing machine simulator. It has a line-oriented interface and runs in any console window (like xterm or kvt). It uses color to show the current head position and state. It implements level-1 optimization (compression of runs and quickly skipping over sequential identical transitions across a run) using regular expressions. I was able to run 100 million steps of the 6-state busy beaver in just a few minutes.

This script runs once a day and updates my Programming Languages Sucks-Rules Chart.

My Apple II file extraction script reads a DOS 3.3 disk image (a text file of hexadecimal-encoded disk bytes), locates individual files and lists their contents. In order to do this it needs to know the 6+2 nybble conversion, sector interleaving, how to locate D5-AA-96 at the beginning of each sector, and token tables for both types of BASIC.

Perl: TMTOWTDI (There's More Than One Way To Do It) !

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License. Details here s.13