I might be so bold as to suggest that a model for "native Perl" would be the code written by those of us that have spoken Perl the most frequently and the longest (and more importantly, have written it enough different ways that we've had time to compare which ones really suck on a reading three months later).

However, one should also consider that part of the coolness of Perl is having so many ways to do things. Certainly, using a for loop instead of a foreach loop to process every element of an array is "less Perlish", but would something like the Schwartzian Transform, which is basically a Lisp-technique adapted to Perl, be "native Perl"? It's hard to tell.

If you can say in three nice simple lines what someone else said in six, I'd say the three lines are probably more Perlish. But when you start trading three lines for three lines, I'm not sure there's a gain. But it's not all about lines of code... that's just my first rule of thumb.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker
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