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lib/Acme/Geo/Whitwell/Name.pm  view on Meta::CPAN

This is very orderly, but confusing to generate by hand (putting aside the 
fact that no one in their right mind really wants to live in "Isilu Buban"
instead of Sydney, AU, or "Feiro Nyvout" instead of Washington, DC). 

The generated names are guaranteed to have alternating consonants and vowels,
and should be pronounceable (though most likely bizarre). I have not been able
to locate the original documentation of the scheme, so I am unable to determine
why some example names are built in "reverse": with the first letter for the
latitude selected from the longitude table, and vice versa for the longitude. I
can only guess that the alternate construction was deemed more pronounceable or
"interesting". Since this is the case, I generate both alternatives so you can
choose the one that seems "better". In the cases of places like McMurdo Base
("Eeseepu Bymeem" or "Neeveil Amyny"), I'm not sure there I<is> a "better".

However, solely for the purposes of amusement, it can be interesting to find
out what a given location would have been called in the alternate universe
where Whitwell's scheme caught on.

It would be lovely to use this module to change all the place names on 
online maps, wouldn't it?

lib/Acme/Geo/Whitwell/Name.pm  view on Meta::CPAN

        # Let's try the easy case first, and insert a decimal point 
        # right before the last two digits. All names generated via 
        # to_whitwell() will work with this case. Since we know the 
        # coordinate string only has numbers in it, we can just divide
        # by 100.
        my $trial_value = $coord_string/100;

        # Manufactured by some other means. Move the decimal left one
        # character at a time until the number is < 180. We never do this
        # at all if our initial guess worked.
        $trial_value /= 10 while $trial_value > 180;
        $coord_string = $trial_value;
    }
    else {
        # < 3, so can't be > 180. Just add decimals.
        $coord_string .= ".00";
    }
    return ($coord_string, $is_negative);
}