If you took a close look at the timestamps on those replies, they were probably posted very close to each other. The fact that there were three nearly identical replies shows you that:

1. There are a lot of people following this site that wish to answer questions for people
2. Those people are looking at new posts frequently enough that several of them will see a new post at the same time
3. Those people are very knowledgable about perl and the best practices for using perl or else they'd be coming up with different answers

I think I would rather see three similar answers to a question than no reply at all (which is the likely result in a lot of other places like newsgroups).

---
print map { my ($m)=1<<hex($_)&11?' ':'';
$m.=substr('AHJPacehklnorstu',hex($_),1) }
split //,'2fde0abe76c36c914586c';
[download]