Yuck, this is humiliating. I can't seem to figure this out. In the latest Obfuscated Perl Contest, the following is listed:
( $ ,, $ ")=("a".."z")[0,-1];print "sh", $ ","m";;";;"
What's even more humiliating is that I can't understand the explanation:
You're indexing twice into the alphabet, and then printing three strings separated by the now-meaningful $,
I get the first part about indexing, but I'm not sure exactly what the 'a' is being assigned to. I've used the debugger and it will print 'z' for $ ", but I can't find where 'a' is going, much less how these are being passed to the print function. And what's up with the the last part? $, is the output list separator, but so what? My brain's been turned inside out and hung up to dry (a line from Cryptonomicon, if anyone cares).

In reply to Obfuscated Perl Question by Ovid

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