Benefits of "Functional Perl": ease of modification

- 2 minutes read - 268 words

In an earlier post I provided code demonstrating my “functional” Perl idiom. The purpose of that code was to take a very simply formatted text file and to turn it into LaTeX Beamer formatting.

Well, recently I found the application iFlipr. In addition to being a site where you can upload flash cards, it also has an iTouch / iPhone version so that you can review when you’re in the bus, in a waiting room, etc.

So, I needed some code to transform my generic data set into–not LaTex–but iFlipr format. With but the most trivial of changes, I was able to accomplish this. The high readability of “functional” Perl made this, literally, a 3 minute affair.

Here’s the diff:

56c56
< 		&produce;_beamer_body(
---
> 		&produce;_iflipr_body(
81c81
< sub produce_beamer_body
---
> sub produce_iflipr_body
83c83
< 	(my $latex_output_file = $_[0]->{file} ) =~ s/\..*$// ;
---
> 	(my $iflipr_output_file = $_[0]->{file} ) =~ s/\..*$// ;
85,93c85,86
< 	open (LATEX, ">$latex_output_file.tex");
< 	
< 	# A technique to tell Perl not to paginate
< 	# ( i.e. re-print LATEX_TOP format ) again
< 	
< 	my $ltx = select LATEX;
< 	$= = 9990;
< 	select $ltx;
< 	
---
> 	open (IFLIPR, ">$iflipr_output_file.iflipr.txt");
> 		
96,97c89
< 	my @order = sort { $a  <=> $b } ( keys ( %$ds ) );
< 	for ( @order )
---
> 	for ( keys %$ds )
100,103c92,93
< 		$part    = $ds->{$_}[1];
< 		$meaning = $ds->{$_}[2];
< 		chomp($word, $part, $meaning);
< 		write (LATEX);
---
> 		$meaning = $ds->{$_}[2];	
> 		print IFLIPR "$word\t$meaning\n";
105,107c95,96
< 
< 	print LATEX $end_of_document;
< 	close LATEX;
---
>  	
> 	close IFLIPR;