nary encoding for fun and profit

I got an email from Tom about a problem he was having with Number::Tolerant. That reminded me to have a look at releasing the trivial changes I had sitting in my repository. While doing that, tab completion reminded me of Number::Nary, so I went and had a look at it. In 0.05, I’d removed a secret feature that I’d written into 0.04. It was very badly done in 0.04, as I recall, but I re-added it correctly, and that makes me happy.

Number::Nary does n-ary encoding of numbers into different digit sets. I’ve written before about its work-related uses, but I also have a silly play-related use that is now officially supported.

#!/usr/bin/perl -l
# jaencode - encode a number in Japanese syllables

use strict;
use warnings;

# missing: a i u e o n chi tsu shi (non-uniform length)
use Number::Nary -codec_pair => {
  digits => [ qw(
    ka ki ku ke ko ta te to sa su se so na ni nu ne no ha
    hi fu he ho ma mi mu me mo ya yu yo ra ri ru re ro wa wo 
  ), ]
};

sub xlate { $_[0] =~ /[a-z]/ ? decode($_[0]) : encode($_[0]) }

   if (@ARGV == 0) { die "usage: jaencode <string ...>\n"  }
elsif (@ARGV == 1) { print xlate($ARGV[0]);                }
else               { print $_ . ": " . xlate($_) for @ARGV }

Then:

knave!rjbs$ jaencode 867 530 999
867: mino
530: nuna
999: yaka

knave!rjbs$ jaencode mino nuna yaka
mino: 867
nuna: 530
yaka: 999

I feel like there are probably other fun or useful things to do with this (where “this” is either Number::Nary or jaencode), but I don’t know what, yet.

Written on May 12, 2006