Frequently Asked Questions

Perl homework 2

  1. Is it safe to assume that the only illegal puctuation will come at the beginning or end of a word?
    No, this is not a valid assumption. Illegal characters may occur anywhere within a word, and must be removed. Further, a single word can contain multiple illegal characters, all of which must be removed.
  2. Why does my sorting algorithm work with Perl 5.8.0 on my own computer, but not with 5.6.1 on RCS?
    sort() was completely re-written in version 5.8.0. In particular, it is now "stable", meaning that items which have the same sorting precedence are guaranteed to stay in the same order they were in before the sort. This is not true of versions prior to 5.8.0, including 5.6.1. For more information, see the v5.8.0 perldelta. This is a reminder that your code must work on rcs-sun1.rpi.edu using Perl 5.6.1
  3. If the input contains "foo.bar", should we treat that as the single word "foobar", or as the two words "foo" and "bar"?
    Treat it as the single word "foobar"
  4. What do we do about words which differ by only a capital vs. lowercase letter? (ie, "Hello" vs "HeLLo")?
    These should be counted as seperate and distinct words. Each of the above two words should be printed in your Starting Capitals list and in your Duplicate Letter list with a frequency of one each.
    However - see the next question.
  5. For the adjacent vowels and duplicate letters, does case matter?
    No. The word HelLo should be in your duplicate letters list, and the word YoU should be in your adjacent vowels list.