Learning Perl, Fourth Edition

Answer to Chapter 10 Exercise

1. Here’s one way to do it:

       my $secret = int(1 + rand 100);
       # This next line may be un-commented during debugging
       # print "Don't tell anyone, but the secret number is $secret.\n";
       while (1) {
         print "Please enter a guess from 1 to 100: ";
         chomp(my $guess = <STDIN>);
         if ($guess =~ /quit|exit|^\s*$/i) {
           print "Sorry you gave up. The number was $secret.\n";
           last;
         } elsif ($guess < $secret) {
           print "Too small. Try again!\n";
         } elsif ($guess =  = $secret) {
           print "That was it!\n";
           last;
         } else {
           print "Too large. Try again!\n";
         }
       }

   The first line picks out our secret number from 1 to 100, and here’s how it works. First, rand is Perl’s random number function, so rand 100 gives us a random number in the range from 0 up to (but not including) 100. That is, the largest possible value of that expression is something like 99.999.^[374] Adding one gives a number from 1 to 100.999, and the int function truncates that, giving a result from 1 to 100, as we needed.

   The commented-out line can help during development and debugging, or if you like to cheat. The main body of this program is the infinite while loop. That will keep asking for guesses until we execute last.

   It’s important that we test the possible strings before the numbers. If we didn’t, do you see what would happen when the user types quit? That would be interpreted as a number (probably giving a warning message if warnings were turned on); since the value as a number would be zero, the poor users would get the ...