'Drawing Names' for Christmas

Back in the days of the Internet Bubble, when stocks of which I owned none were doing so very well, it was expected that everyone in the family would buy at least one gift for everyone else in the family. n * (n - 1) gifts. Ridiculous.

When the word budget was once again a part of the vernacular, I was called upon to write a program to "draw names". The mark of poverty. This was December of 2000. Behold, my creation:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;

# this is how we generate the random seed value.
srand( time ^ $$ ^ unpack "%32L*", `ps wwaxl | gzip` );

# Obviously, the list of names.
my $list = [
 {name=>'Curtis',    match=>-1},
 {name=>'Kevin',     match=>-1},
 {name=>'Natalie',   match=>-1},
 {name=>'Aimee',     match=>-1}
];

# Each time a person's name is drawn, we put it in here,
# so that they are not drawn again.
my $done = [];

# for each person in the list, find a recipient for them.
for my $x (0..$#$list) {
  CJ: while ( 1 ) {
    my $r = int(rand(@{$list}));
    if( $done->[$r] || $r == $x ) {
      next CJ;
    }
    else {
      $list->[$x]{match} = $r;
      $done->[$r] = 1;
      last CJ;
    }
  }
}

for my $x (0..$#$list) {
  print $list->[$x]{name} . " drew " .
        $list->[$list->[$x]{match}]{name} . "\n";
}

Just dump this amazing program into a file with a .pl extension (ie, Perl), and run it ... you do have Perl installed on your machine, right?? Windows, you say? I didn't know people still used that. Does it still let you over-write the contents of main memory by doing this:

int
main (int argc, char **argv)
{
  int my_array[10];
  int * ptr = (int *)&my_array;
  
  while (1)
    *(ptr++) = 0xfeedface;
  
  return;
}

That poor machine in CS class....

Update: Some bastard is trying to rip off MY idea. May a thousand bugs descend upon his code. :-)