2024 Advent Of Code in Perl

The title says it all. I’ve never programmed in Perl. I hacked some existing scripts, but never tried this oldie. But as it is a great language for text processing, it was time to start learning it. Maybe it will come handy some time in the future.

My repo is at https://github.com/sixhat/adventofcode.com/tree/main/2024/

Notes on using Perl for AoC

(or… things I’m learning along the way)

• unless is interesting, but I have to get my head around it. But it works.
• $@% ? What? I have a lot to learn on the syntax front of Perl.
• use strict; and use warnings; are your friend
• Pass by value and pass by reference are dependent on a lexical variable being created on the subroutine my @local_var = @_.
• Regular Expressions are powerful, but they also introduce some complexity and trying to debug them is harder.
• Use of uninitialized value warnings reveals some undef entries in an array (for example in my @matches). Trick to check them out is to print join(', ', @matches) to double check.
• smartmatch is really nice (day 5).
• Install a repl - Reply - or any other. It makes testing simple things in the language a breeze.