That's fair. I suppose I've seen the "map-sort-map" construct enough times that I don't even blink at it. Heck, as long as we're on the subject, I may as well mention the only downfall (that I know) of the ST. As with a lot of things perl, you end up trading memory for speed. For every element in your initial list, you create an anonymous array of two elements. For large* lists, this can actually be prohibitive.
Snippets of code should be wrapped in
<code> tags not<pre> tags. In fact, <pre>
tags should generally be avoided. If they must
be used, extreme care should be
taken to ensure that their contents do not
have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent
horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor
intervention).