nadir

#!/usr/bin/perl

# First off. Always use strict and warnings.
# There are places where you cant use strict or warnings, but you'll disable
# only a small part of it, like so:

# no strict 'refs';

# But you wont have to do that in some time.
# So let's add strict and warnings:

use strict;
# I prefer to make all my warnings fatal. That means, if you get a warning, it
# will count as a compile time error, and the script will terminate.
use warnings FATAL => 'all'; 


# Those are global! That's very rarely needed, and when it's needed, you should 
# prefix them with our, like so:

# our @words;

# Elsewhere, always prefix them with my. That'll make it *lexical* to the current
# scope. Very important.

# Also, he creates an array with ONE element here. That's not what he wanted.
# He meant:

# @words = ()

# That'll give the array @words the value of an empty list. But that is never
# needed when you're initializing an array, because it's always empty.

# So we replace this:

## @words = ("");
## $counter = 0;

# with this...

my @words;
my $counter = 0;

# Once again - use lexicals! What he does here is using barewords, words without
# sigills. Those are globals - bad. 

# So we replace this..

## open FILE, "<words.dta" or die $!;
## while ($line = readline(FILE))
## {
## chomp $line;
## push(@words, $line);
## $counter++;
## }
## close(FILE);

# with this...

open(my $fh, '<', 'words.dta') or die("Cant open words.dta: $!\n");
while(my $line = <$fh>) {
  chomp $line;
  push(@words, $line);
  $counter++;
}

close $fh;

# choose one
$random_number = int(rand($counter));
print $words[$random_number] . "\n"; 


# Furthermore, there's no need for that counter. You get the number of elements
# of a list by using it in scalar context, so:

print $words[ int(rand( @words )) ], "\n"; 

# would suffer well.