an unfortunately ugly ?: chain:

It need not be quite so ugly. Reverse the first test so you get a chained ternary nstead of a nested ternary. Then parenthesize the tests and line up the ? and : vertically and it becomes a whole lot easier to read (IMO).

 (!defined($key)) ? $bar
                  : (exists($foo{$key})) ? $foo{$key}
                                         : $foo{$key} = undef;
[download]

Incidentally I'm betting you format your code using some kind of automatic indenter (cperl-mode perhaps?) In my experience code formatters do awful things to chained and nested ternary ops. So format em by hand and you get much more readable results.

:-)

Yves / DeMerphq
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Writing a good benchmark isnt as easy as it might look.