This was more the thing I had in mind when I started this debate. You see, when asked my mindset was heavily into dereferencing due to working on writing a program to extract data from a hashref of a hashref of a hashref. So it was probably mostly due to that that I responded the way I did instead of using the more familiar, and readable, scalar(keys %hash)).

To me, this is the great advantage, as well as the greatest potential hazard, of using perl. It is easy to write code differently depending on how you are thinking at the time, the phase of the moon, the weather, the day of the week and a million other reasons. What I was interested in seeing was, not who can obfuscate; we have another section for that, but who has written down any of those little syntactic gems that are only possible in a language like perl.

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