NAME

vague - Perl pragma to reduce precision in your programming constructs

SYNOPSIS

use vague;

DESCRIPTION

This pragma exports a set of new, imprecise keywords into your namespace to facilitate fuzzy programming methodologies and nondeterministic algorithms.

none, hardly, few, some, many, quite, lots, most, almost, nearly, all

If given a list of arguments these methods return some random subset of the list, from roughly 'none' items to roughly 'all' of them. If given a single scalar that is numeric they return a number that is appropriately smaller than the input variable. If given a string they return an appropriately long substring, starting at the start of the string.

any (@list)

In scalar context it returns an element from its list of arguments. In list context it returns the entire list, shuffled.

$x = any of qw(a b c d e f g h i j);
foreach ( any qw(a b c d e f g h i j) ) {
#...

roughly ($scalar [ $ceiling [ $floor [ $spread ]]])

Returns a number that is roughly $scalar. Optionally you can supply a ceiling, and a floor, to limit the range returned. The $spread argument just says how wide the deviations can be.

generally $coderef or probably $coderef

Probably execute the code referred to. You can say, for example:

probably sub { print "Hello world\n"; };
generally \&trace('message');

random number, random word

Returns a pseudo-random word if followed by 'word', or pseudo-random integer otherwise. The sequence repeats every 20 calls to this functions. Occasionally you will get 'feck!' or 22/7 returned instead of one of the usual values. This is normal behaviour.

of

Does nothing, but allows nice English-like constructions such as:

for (most of 1..20) { # etc...

EXAMPLES

print some of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10;
print nearly all of "And did those feet in ancient times walk upon England's mountains green.";
print hardly any of "And did those feet in ancient times walk upon England's mountains green.";

my $number = roughly 20;
$number = almost 20;

my @widgets = qw(a b c d e f g);
my $x = any @widgets;

for (most of 1..20) {
	generally \&foo('hello');
}

probably sub { foo('prob') };

for (1..30) {
	print random word, " ", random number, "\n";
}

sub foo { my $msg = shift; print "In foo msg $msg\n"; }

AUTHOR AND COPYRIGHT

P Kent, pause@selsyn.co.uk Nov 2001 This is covered by the same terms as Perl itself.

$Id: vague.pm,v 1.3 2001/12/20 05:13:24 piers Exp $