Just in case you don't realise what was meant.. Golf is where Perl programmers try and get a reasonably simple task completed in the least number of (key)strokes. As such it's not quite obfuscation, but it's a very close relative.

Golfing in everyday code is generally a very bad thing as it results in Perl that consists of streams of delicate logic which are very unreadable, and even less maintainable.

I have met Golf before, though I don't play (for obvious reasons :-). Actually it was a private message explaining Golf in response to a post on beginners@perl or similar that directed me towards PMs

Very interesting to read your post, probably even more interesting to finally understand it at some point.

Forgive me if I don't emulate your solution in my code though :-)