All right, I'll jump in. I'm not exactly a newbie, but I'm also not an 'expert' (fill in your own opinion on what an 'expert' is).

So without further ado, this is what I ended up with:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
%couples = (
    Fred=>"Wilma",
    Barney=>"Betty",
    George=>"Jane",
    Homer=>"Marge",
    Peter=>"Lois"
);
print "$_ is married to $couples{$_}\n" for (sort keys %couples);
[download]

Looking at just the important line, I started with:

foreach $key (sort keys %couples) {print "$key is married to $couples{
+$key}\n"};
[download]

Hmm, exactly 80 characters. But wait, I can use the default variable ('$_') rather than creating my own, so I'm now down to 71 characters.

foreach (sort keys %couples) {print "$_ is married to $couples{$_}\n"}
+;
[download]

Ahh, there's more. 'foreach' can be written as 'for' taking me done to 67 characters:

for (sort keys %couples) {print "$_ is married to $couples{$_}\n"};
[download]

Not quite - I can get rid of those pesky brackets by reversing the 'for' and 'print' statements, reducing it down to 65 characters:

print "$_ is married to $couples{$_}\n" for (sort keys %couples);
[download]

And that's as far as I've gotten. I've noticed that my solution got more 'perlish' (albeit not much) as I went along, so I was hoping that some of our more experienced monks would contribute as well - and notes as to how you got there are most welcome. Most Perl golf I see is from a realm I'm not familiar with, so a map to that wonderful place would be appreciated greatly.

Pat

P.S. Viewng my post in VIM with syntax checking on leads to some strange colored text...

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