NPL Puzzler for 6 Oct

The NPL puzzle for 6 oct was an interesting little Perl exercise [I'm not 
sure how to solve it analytically --- I played with it some to little 
avail --- but it was certainly subject to brute force, and it turned out 
to be a cute little thing.

    Write out the digits from 1-9 in order. Then add some plus (+) signs
    and times (x) signs to the string to make it add up to 2,002. As
    usual in arithmetic, multiplication is done before addition, and you
    don't have to put a sign between every 2 digits. The answer is
    unique.  

What's odd is that my little Perl program found *TWO* solutions, but one 
is potentially ambiguous [in particular, given those rules, what should 
the value of "a*b*c" be?-- it doesn't say whether things should be done 
left-to-right or right-to-left, so perhaps that could be used to exclude 
one of the two solutions.

Anyhow, here's the little program I whipped up for it... the fun part is 
that it is one of the rare times that counting base-3 is useful:

for (my $count = 0; $count < 3**8; $count += 1)
{   my $try = fixstr($count) ;
    print $try,"\n" if eval($try) == 2002 ;
}
exit ;

sub fixstr
{   my $key = $_[0] ;
    my $str = "123456789" ;
    for (my $i = 8; $i > 0; $i -= 1)
    {   my $next = $key % 3 ;
        $key = int($key/3) ;
        next unless $next ;
        substr ($str, $i, 0, $next == 1? '+': "*") ;
    }
    return $str ;
}

Obviously I'm not a golfer, but I'm wondering if there are any other 
interesting approaches to the problem...  [base-3 and eval seemed pretty 
clean/cute to me]

  /Bernie\

-- 
Bernie Cosell                     Fantasy Farm Fibers
mailto:bernie@fantasyfarm.com     Pearisburg, VA
    -->  Too many people, too few sheep  <--          

• NPL Puzzler for 6 Oct by Bernie Cosell
• Re: NPL Puzzler for 6 Oct by Abigail
• Re: NPL Puzzler for 6 Oct by Mtv Europe
• Re: NPL Puzzler for 6 Oct by Ronald J Kimball
• Re: NPL Puzzler for 6 Oct by Bernie Cosell