in reply to a japh attempt

I liked this one, and I offer my attempt at a spoiler below, and it's not 100% imho. (My attempt). I liked your use of split-pop and using $_ as a subroutine ref.. I wasn't quite sure why/what $^&& but I think I narrowed it down to another way to write a while loop..

Sorry I can't offer much insight, but it was fun. :) highlight <<HIGHLIGHT;
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

##$^=length of @_ which = split on anything the variable 
##$_ (which = "\nrekcaH lreP rehtonA tsuJ)
$^=@_=split//,$_="\nrekcaH lreP rehtonA tsuJ";

##At this point, $^=25, @_="\nrekcaH lreP rehtonA tsuJ";

##$_=an anonymous subroutine that is passed $_ (remember,
##$_=the backwards japh)
$_=	&{sub{ 	## We create another subroutine inside this one (I think)
%_=map{++$/=>$_}split'',pop;	
## For every char returned by (pop) we split,
## Applying that split's $_ to the hash returned
## By increasing the value in $/ by one,
## $/ starts out as newline, ++ makes it a 1..
\%_ 
## I haven't figured out why we make a ref to %_ yet
}}($_);

_:## I suspect the goto below has something to do with this.. ;)
$/='!@_';## Also sets $/ to '!@_'; 
$/=~s^.{3}^%s^;## Replaces all (three chars in string anyway) with %s
## while($^) goto _ but in the sprintf we printf the value at ${_} (created with map above)
$^&&goto$'.sprintf(''.'_',printf$/,${$_}{$^--});
HIGHLIGHT

One4k4 - perlmonks@poorheart.com (www.poorheart.com)