Robbie Hatley’s Solutions, in Perl, for The Weekly Challenge #393 (“Pythagoras Multiplied” and “Prime Step”)

For those not familiar with "The Weekly Challenge", it is a weekly programming puzzle with two parts, with a new pair of tasks each Monday. You can find it here: The Weekly Challenge

The Weekly Challenge for the week of 2026-09-28 through 2026-10-04 is #393.

The tasks for challenge #393 are as follows:

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Task 393-1: Pythagoras Multiplied
Submitted by: Ulrich Rieke
You are given a positive integer n. Find the number of all
positive integer triplets (a, b, c) so that a^2 + b^2 = c^2
and a, b and c are integers <= n.

I'll use a pair of nested ranged foreach loops to check all possible (c,a) pairs to see which (if any) need b values which are positive integers in order for "$a*$a + $b*$b == $c*$c" to be true.

Robbie Hatley's Perl Solution to The Weekly Challenge 393-1

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Task 393-2: Prime Step
Submitted by: Ulrich Rieke
You are given a string with English alphabetic characters only.
What is the absolute difference of the sum of the ASCII values of
the characters in the string to the nearest prime number?

I only have two hours before the deadline, so I am NOT going to try to implement "nearest_prime" from scratch. Instead, I'll allow "prev_prime", "next_prime", and "is_prime" from CPAN module "Math::Prime::Util" to come to my aid.

Robbie Hatley's Perl Solution to The Weekly Challenge 393-2

That's it for challenge 393; see you on challenge 394!