Just for completeness’ sake, that strip function code is a condensed syntactic (near) equivalent of this function:

sub strip {
    my @r = @_;
    for ( @r ) {
        s/\A\s+//;
        s/\s+\z//;
    }
    return @r;
}
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But I didn’t want to spend 6 lines on a routine that is completely incidental to the main point of the code, and which I put there only to emulate the exact behaviour of the Ruby and Python counterparts. If it were in a module with string functions, I would write it in the long-hand form. Programming is writing and code is literature. Sometimes you need to linger on the details and sometimes they would only derail the pacing.

Makeshifts last the longest.