In order to work with the programming elements that I would need to accomplish the task of having a user of a Perl program guess a secret word (the homework assignment from the last lesson), I thought I needed to define the secret word by putting it into another scalar variable - $secretword.  Then, after the greeting, the person who is not me would be asked (with another print) for the guess.  I'd compare the guess with the secret word (this time using the ne operator [which returns true if the strings are not equal {this is the logical opposite of the eq operator}]).  Then, I'd have the result of this comparison control a while loop (which executes a block of code as long as the comparison is true).  Here's the code:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
$secretword = "llama";		# the secret word
print "What is your name? ";
$name = <STDIN>;
chomp ($name);
if ($name eq "Larry") {
	print "Hello, Larry!  How good of you to be here!\n";
}
else {
	print "Hello, $name!\n"; # ordinary greeting
	print "What is the secret word? ";
	$guess = <STDIN>;
	chomp ($guess);
	while ($guess ne $secretword) {
		print "Wrong, try again.  What is the secret word? ";
		$guess = <STDIN>;
		chomp ($guess);
	}
	print "Good guess!  Have a great day!!";
}

Of course, this is not a very secure program, because anyone who is tired of guessing can merely interrupt the program and get back to the prompt, or even look at the source to determine the word.  But, this time we weren't trying to write a security system, just an example for this workshop.  (Which is to say that in a future workshop, we will be adding a modest amount of security.)

Alrighty, then!  Next lesson, let's see how we can modify this program to allow for more than one valid secret word.  What programming elements do you suppose are required to accomplish this task?