[sf-lug] Tutor me in Programming?

[Jeff Bragg]

Sorry, that should read "including incrementing the values starting from the
right" not "left".

On Sun, Sep 7, 2008 at 8:49 AM, Jeff Bragg <jackofnotrades at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> You can add numbers, but you can only "concatenate" (append one string to
>> another) strings.  There's also a whole art and science to manipulating
>> strings.
>>
>
> Perl is somewhat of an exception to this rule.  While it won't exactly let
> you *add* strings/characters as you would integers, it will allow you to
> increment them.  For example, if you had a variable $v and incremented it as
> $v++, it would yield the next successive alphabetic element, so $v = 'a'
> would become 'b' , $v = 'n'  would become 'o', $v = 'z' would become 'aa',
> and so forth, treating the string as much as possible like an integer
> (including incrementing the values starting from the left, which would be
> the least significant digit in a integer).  So, $v = 'abc', if incremented,
> becomes 'abd', and so forth until when it reaches 'abz', incrementing again
> would yield 'aca'.
>
> I'll stop corrupting people with Perl black magicks now.  You've given a
> succinct, easy-to-digest, abstract overview of the essentials of
> programming, IMO.
>
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