[Wow, I must've deleted FWP from my folder list; so much mail here these days. Paying attn now..]
So, the moderately infamous sexchart got some more media attn recently which spurred thoughts of writing a parser for it. The sexchart, a seriously impressive piece of ASCII art/documentation is at http://www.attrition.org/hosted/sexchart/sexchart.9.25 described in Wired recently, http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,48997,00.html I couldn't figure out a Perl-ish way of parsing it, resorting to putting it all in a big 2D array and scurrying around it. With lots of consistency checking it takes about 5s to run on my 1.6GHz box (yikes). Hashes & caches were used in some places but the core is basically looking at each character in turn. Thought I'd throw it out and see if anyone can think up another way... I GraphViz'ed it too, http://junk.paulm.com/sexchart/undirected/ http://junk.paulm.com/sexchart/directed/ Some of those are quite big when they're rendered; start small if you don't have oodles of RAM. *.png recommended for download size. Happy new year, Paul -- Paul Makepeace ....................................... http://paulm.com/ "If he were here now, then we truly are doomed." -- http://paulm.com/toys/surrealism/