SPUG: Special Meeting: The Horror That Is SelfGOL

[Colin Meyer]

Friends,

Join us to welcome back Damian Conway for this month's meeting. Working
his way up the west coast from OReilly's Perl Conference in San Diego,
Damian stops back in Seattle to give us a taste of his latest madness,
extreme programming with Perl.

The meeting is on Thursday, 8/9/01 (instead of the usual Tuesday), from
7 to 9 in the evening at the regular meeting space at N2H2.  See the
webpage at http://zipcon.net/spug for directions.

>From the description at: http://yetanother.org/damian/events/Extreme.html

the SelfGOL program: an obfuscated, self-aware, viral quine that can: 

  .  self-replicate,
  .  rewrite other Perl programs to allow them to self-replicate, 
  .  detect un-rewritable Perl programs, 
  .  execute itself or other Perl programs as cellular automata of
     arbitrary size (to play Conway's "Game of Life"),
  .  animate any short text as a cycling marquee banner.

SelfGOL accomplishes these feats in under 1000 bytes of standard Perl,
without importing any modules, and without using a single if, unless,
while, until, for, foreach, goto, next, last, redo, map, or grep.

To do all that in under 1K of code, it relies on some extreme
programming techniques, and on many of the obscure backwaters of the
Perl syntax. This talk explores both.

In other words, it's everything you never wanted to know about Perl, and
would have been afraid to ask.



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