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11.16.07
Random Subroutines In Perl
 By
A.P. Lawrence
I'll bet your first question might be "why on earth would I ever want to call subroutines randomly?".
Admittedly, it isn't a need that comes up that often, but (for example) it's used right here on this very page that you are reading.
Ayup, you guessed it, it's ads again. I know, I know: you hate the ads, but they pay the bills, and actually every now and then there's something that actually might be of interest, so there it is and there they are. If you need to see the page without ads, disabling Javascript will get rid of a lot of them, and clicking on the "Printer Friendly" link will absolutely remove them all.
OK, now that you've accepted the inevitable, let's look at things from the publisher's point of view. We have various ads to run, and places to run them. What runs where? Well, duh, you put the best performing ads first. OK, then what? Second best? Sure, but what happens when you don't know what works best? Like right about to the left of this paragraph, what works best there?
Or maybe I just want them random to help combat that awful "ad blindness" that comes from people seeing the the same thing in the same place and therefor not really seeing it at all. Maybe mixing things up will help.
Whatever the reason, I have a choice of three or four ads I could stick over there, but I'm not sure which I want first. Maybe I want random Perl subroutines?
Why subroutines rather than just variables containing the text of the various ads? Well, you could do it that way, but subroutines seem cleaner to me. It comes down to doing something like this:
I think the first form (an anonymous subroutine) is neater and less confusing to modify. So let's use that. This example defines a few anonymous subroutines and then runs through them randomly:
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