It's a good question. There are cases where one might want to apply different conditions on the operands or where one of the operands isn't $a or $b at all. These cases are rare but they do crop up from time to time.

I have had a trawl through some code of mine and haven't found one yet. Closest I have is this:

@abc = sort { length ($b) <=> length ($a) || $a cmp $b } @abc;

[download]

Even through here we are treating $a and $b in the same way, I don't know how you would express this without the flexibility that the current syntax gives. It would not be as succinct, that's for sure.

🦛

In reply to Re: Notation of sort function by hippo
in thread Notation of sort function by Alphaphi

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