did somebody notify the map that wants to be a grep? ;-) of course, i think:

# code found under "Decorating Lists" entitled paragraph, line 6.
my @files = reverse sort map { -d $_ ? $_ : () } readdir DIR;
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i have not seen this solution before, but i find it all sorts from cool to strange.

strange - i think, anyone with a functional background expects that, after a map, there is exactly the same number of elements in the list as before.

cool - it shows that the grep is essential the sugar coat around the syntactic sugar. but, because the grep is a standard tool in any unix environment, the gain of expressiveness is tremendous.