Christmas quiz 2010

[Chris Jack]

Well the quiz obviously went down as well as the proverbial lead balloon, but I thought I should publish some answers anyway. Apologies for the loss of formatting in the perl code - it's formatted when I sent it. Oh and merry xmas: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QGCrIY1HME


questions based on http://www.onyxneon.com/books/modern_perl/modern_perl_a4.pdf
1) What does "Tim Toady" refer to?
It's the pronounciation of the acronym: there's more than one way to do it

2) What does this output?
for (qw( Huex Dewex Louid )) {
  $_++;
  print;
}
---
Doesn't compile as attempting to alter a constant

3) What year was Perl first released in?
1988

4) If the following was a complete perl program, would it initialise %hohoho.
What statements could you add to verify this?

my %hohoho;
if ($hohoho{Robot}{Santa}{Claus} eq "sleigh") {
  print "Coming to town\n";
}
---
%hohoho gets initialised.
my %hohoho;
print scalar(%hohoho) ."\n";
if ($hohoho{Robot}{Santa}{Claus} eq "sleigh") {
  print "Coming to town\n";
}
print scalar(%hohoho) ."\n";

5) What version of Perl 5 introduced the given/when constructs?
5.10

6) What does the following output?
print scalar((a,b)) . "\n";
---
b

7) What is Perlscript?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PerlScript

8) What does the following output?
sub parent {
  print "Perl 4\n";
  &child;
  print "Perl 5\n";
  child;
}
sub child {
  my(@a) = (@_);
  for my $i (@a) {
    print "$i\n";
  }
}
parent(1,2);
---
Perl 4
1
2
Perl 5

9) In December, what will the localtime function report the month as?
11

10) Think of a witty and/or interesting Perl Christmas quiz question and
answer it.