January 28, 2008 

You might be a nerd if: You write a perl script to count sheep for you…

… in binary.

I couldn’t seep last night, so I decided to count sheep. Counting reminded me of the time my brother mentioned that one could count in binary on ones fingers. That sounded pleasantly meditative, so I set my brain to work on figuring out how one might do that. Before long I had counted quite high, and was fascinated by the way the system worked. Naturally my brain wandered to: “how might a computer do this simple task?” By now I had completely lost interest in sleep, so I sneaked out of bed, turned on the laptop and cranked out a little application to count in binary for me. I was then a free to go back to sleep, having automated the tedious task of counting sheep.

The code follows:


(Excuse: I am very new to Perl and did not have internet access at the time I wrote this, so my reference resources were limited.)

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#!/usr/bin/env perl
 
# Counts in binary
 
# The array of digets, starting with the least significant
@binary = (0);
while(@binary < 79){
$i = 0;
$found = 0;
# Until we find a 0
while($found == 0){
# if its a 0
if(@binary[$i] == 0){
#set it to one
@binary[$i] = 1;
# Set all previous digets back to 0
$j = 0;
while($j < $i){
@binary[$j] = 0;
$j++;
}
$found = 1;
}
$i++;
}
$k = @binary;
# Print the digets in the correct order
while($k >= 0){
print "@binary[$k]";
$k--;
}
print "\n";
sleep(1);
}

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One Response to “You might be a nerd if: You write a perl script to count sheep for you…”

  1. karmicoma March 14, 2008 at 12:38 am #

    I remember someone teaching me how to count binary on one hand. I thought I learned it in high school. Did you teach me?

    Reply

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