infobot

infobot chat
A bot that serves as a common database of information (often noteworthy URLs) for users on a chat system. Infobots often have a simple chatbot interface, responding to key-phrases, as well as to direct queries.
Here, in a real conversation, the bot Purl's first response is triggered by the phrase "just tell me", and its second response is triggered by being directly asked "perlfunc?":
can someone tell me what: $num9 = substr($number,9,1); means
eesh -- man perlfunc, look at "substr".
just tell me
Didn't your momma ever tell you, "Go look it up in the dictionary"?!
eesh -- no. that's all we'll tell you. read the documentation.
eesh -- if you haven't man pages or perldoc, you can read them on the 'net.
purl, perlfunc?
well, perlfunc is Perl builtin functions, at man perlfunc or http://perl.com/CPAN-local/doc/manual/html/pod/perlfunc.html
(http://cs.cmu.edu/~lenzo/infobot.html/).
(1998-10-30)