"This wonderfully symmetrical one-liner contributed by Phil Abercrombie returns the lesser of $a and $b.
It can be written with less wasted technology, but then it isn't nearly as pretty:

$result = ($a, $b)[$b <= $a]"

* Perl Best Practices:

"[...] The syntactic symmetry is very elegant, of course, and devising it obviously provided the original developer with a welcome diversion from the tedium of everyday coding. But a clever line of code like that is a (recurring) nightmare to understand and to maintain, and imposes an unnecessary burden on everyone in the development and maintenance teams.

[...] However, it's also possible to write that same expression in a way that's so obvious, straightforward, and plain-spoken that it requires no effort at all to verify that it implements the desired behaviour:

use List::Util qw( min );

$result = min($a, $a);
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It's not "clever" and it's even marginally slower, but it is clean, clear, efficient, scalable, and easy to maintain. And that's always a much better choice."