cool

[nkuipers]

I played around in recursion a bit, wanting to get the practice but also to do 
something useful.  So I framed it to myself as an exercise.  This was my first 
idea:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

=pod
write a recursive function that generates a random DNA sequence of length N
=cut

sub makeDNA {
	my $n = shift;
	my @alphabet = qw( A C G T);
	if ($lengthRemaining == 0)
	{
		return;
	}
	print $alphabet[int(rand(4))];
	makeDNA($n - 1);
}

makeDNA(10);
print "\n";

This could develop into a small host of other recursive, random 
functionalities useful for bioinformatics, such as taking a sequence and 
randomly mutating n residues.  I will be incorporating above subroutine and 
possibly others in my BIO::Basic module.

Cheers,

Nathanael Kuipers