The problem, of course, is that my strange code is innovative, unique, clever; their strange code is just bizarre and dumb.
Indeed the code that I submitted for this snippet is conceptually the same I had posted to news:comp.lang.perl.misc earlier in this article (available from Google Groups here), but the latter had "somewhat" less orthodox flow control structures; and indeed IIRC someone misunderstood it. Needless to say I thought this choice was very cool, back then...

In reply to Re^2: a proposal for a new section on PerlMonks by blazar
in thread a proposal for a new section on PerlMonks by gargle

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