Building off mrbbking, why don't we try and get rid of \n. After thinking and messing around bit, I ended up using $*: The multiline matching variable. I'd love to know *why* this works, and if it's compatible with *nix, as I used activestate.

Update: Tested on a FreeBSD shell, and it *does* work, as long as we run it with perl -l...

Please don't run this with warnings, as it won't work because $* is a deprecated special variable.

Here Goes: Still 59 Letters

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

Another idea that may or may not have merit is to set %couples to a shorter word, and call that in the print. Something that would (logically) be *like*

print"$_ is married to $c{$_}$*"for sort keys(%c=%couples)
[download]

That code doesn't work, though, and would save you just one character.

Update 2: I found it strange that I was getting newlines, instead of 0 or 1 from $*, so I investigated. From perldoc perlrun: -l enables automatic line-ending processing. If octnum is omitted, sets $\ to the current value of $/. That means that there's no reason to use $*, as -l will give us $/, anyways.

You will then realize that the previous answers would be correct, if we got rid of \n, or in my case $* (-l chops the last letter off in addition, which meant that my $* which should have been evaluated as 0 or 1, was being chopped off and replaced by a newline ($/). Strage, but we don't even need to print newlines, with perl -l :)

That means: print"$_ is married to $couples{$_}"for sort keys%couples can replace the respective line in the previous solution(s)

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Gyan Kapur
gyan.kapur@rhhllp.com

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