From “Concrete Perl” | Nick Montfort

Concrete_PerlWEB

From “Concrete Perl” 

These are three of the four “Concrete Perl” poems, realized as 32-character Perl programs:

Alphabet Expanding
ASCII Hegemony
Letterformed Terrain

One can simply copy and paste the following four lines individually into a terminal — these correspond to the four titles above:

perl -e ‘{print$,=$”x($.+=.01),a..z;redo}’
perl -e ‘{print” “.chr for 32..126;redo}’
perl -e ‘{print$”,$_=(a..z)[rand$=];redo}’

For purposes of determining the platform precisely and counting characters, the rules of Perl Golf are used. These rules, for instance, do not count the (optional) newline at the end of a one-line program. The Concrete Perl programs work on all standard versions of Perl 5.8.0 and have been verified as 32 characters long using a count program.

These programs are also written to work and to be visually pleasing on terminal windows (or terminals) of any geometry.

The fourth program is designed to crash and so is not a screensaver-like work.

 

BIO

Nick Montfort
http://nickm.com
MIT

Nick Montfort develops computational art and poetry, often collaboratively. He is on the faculty at MIT in CMS/Writing and is the principal of the naming firm Nomnym. Montfort wrote the books of poems #! and Riddle & Bind, co-wrote 2002: A Palindrome Story, and developed more than forty digital projects including the collaborations The Deletionist and Sea and Spar Between. The MIT Press has published four of his collaborative and individual books: The New Media Reader, Twisty Little Passages, Racing the Beam, and 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10, with Exploratory Programming for the Arts and Humanities coming soon.

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