[Kc] Perl 'Expert' Quiz-of-the-Week #22

[Garrett Goebel]

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Qing3 Zhu4Yi4: Qing3 Ning2 Deng3Dao4 Jie1Dao4 Ben3 Xin4Xi2 Zhi1Hou4 60
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Write a program, 'wordladder', which gets two arguments, which are words of
the same length, and which constructs and prints a "word ladder" from the
first word to the second word.

A word ladder from word AAA to word BBB is a sequence of dictionary words
such that:

1. the first word in the sequence is word AAA 2. each word in the sequence
after the first differs from the previous
   word in exactly one letter position
3. the last word in the sequence is word BBB

For example, given the two words "love" and "hate", the program might print
the word ladder:

        love
        hove
        have
        hate

Or it might print:

        love
        lave
        have
        hate

It might also print a longer word ladder, such as

        love
        lore
        lobe
        robe
        role
        rose
        lose
        lost
        most
        mosh
        moth
        math
        hath
        hate

If the program is unable to find a word ladder, it should print an
appropriate error message to the standard error, and exit with a failure
status.

The program should also accept an optional third argument, which, if
specified, is the name of a dictionary file which contains the permissible
words.  If the third argument is omitted, the program should use a default
dictionary.

Sample word lists are available from
        http://perl.plover.com/qotw/words/

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