Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watmath!att!rutgers!usc!bbn.com!orc!inews!iwarp.intel.com!psueea!parsely!agora!markb
From: markb@agora.uucp (Mark Biggar)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl
Subject: Perl as a pocket calculator
Message-ID: <1990Jul15.210705.11140@agora.uucp>
Date: 15 Jul 90 21:07:05 GMT
Reply-To: markb@.UUCP (Mark Biggar)
Organization: Betazoid Central
Lines: 18

Needing a calculator program the other day and not having anything like
bc available, I wrote a simple 6 line perl script that evaled and printed
each of its input lines.  After playing with it for a while, I noticed
that it all could be done very simply from the command line like so:

perl -pe "s/^.*$/eval $&/e;"

After I mentioned this to Larry he suggested using:

perl -pe "s/^.*$/(eval $&).$@/e;"

so any error messages would be printed out.  This is very useful
not only as a pocket calculator replacement, but as a tool for trying
perl stuff out when writing perl scripts.

--
Perl's Maternal Uncle
Mark Biggar