The usual rationale for Perl's extreme syntactic flexibility is that, while it can lead to some truly hideous code (and utterly unreadable obfuscations), it also allows the clever programmer to write truly beautiful code.

I'm trying to illustrate this on the Perl page of a new version of my personal site (which I expect to be viewed mainly by experienced Internet users who haven't done any "programming" more complicated than HTML). Problem is, I'm not even sure where to look. So my question is, what beautiful Perl code have you seen? Suggestions should be for functioning code, not Perl poetry. For the purposes of the site, I'm hoping to find short snippets that read well to somebody who doesn't know Perl, but I'd also be interested to hear about cases where the beauty extends beyond the scope of a dozen or so lines.

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