You've seen some of these posts from me before. Somehow, I manage to come across some of the most interesting Perl code. Here are a couple of gems I plucked from an old program that I found on one of our boxes.

First, for all of you who detest using push:

my %hash = ( foo => 1,
             bar => 2,
             baz => 3 );
my @result;
foreach ( keys %hash ) {
    $result[ @result ] = "$_:$hash{ $_ }";
}
[download]

Interestingly, it doesn't fair too poorly in a (admittedly hasty) benchmark:

my %hash = ( 1 .. 100000 );

timethese( 500000, {
  'obfu'   => 'my @result;
               for my $key ( keys %hash ) {
                   $result[ @result ] = "$key:$hash{ $key }";
               }',
  'push'   => 'my @result;
               for my $key ( keys %hash ) {
                   push @result, "$key:$hash{ $key }";
               }',
});

#Results:
#Benchmark: timing 500000 iterations of obfu, push...
#      obfu:  5 wallclock secs ( 2.93 usr +  0.01 sys =  2.94 CPU) @ 1
+69836.96/s (n=500000)
#      push:  3 wallclock secs ( 2.94 usr +  0.00 sys =  2.94 CPU) @ 1
+70357.75/s (n=500000)
[download]

And here's an interesting attempt to validate arguments to an object constructor. What the heck was this programmer thinking?

sub new {
    my ($class, $orderID, $owner, $limit) = @_;
    foreach (qw'orderID') { (croak __PACKAGE__ . "->new() needs a ${_}
+.") unless (eval("\$$_")) }

    # rest of constuctor ...
}
[download]

Any accidental obfuscations you'd care to share?

Cheers,
Ovid

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