It's Perl, it's original design and many years of refinement that make this sort of thing easy. A language developed to solve problems rather than comply to some academic or commiteed theory.

It just takes a while to encounter all the ways to use it, and a bit longer to be able to remember them all. I'm still a relative novice and still learn something new here almost every day.

Think about map, grep, and sort as operating on lists as a whole. That's what made the functional parts of Perl really click for me. for-loops operate on items that just happen to be bundled in lists. map and grep operate on lists that just happen to have items in them.

Yeah, but my situation here was sort of like moving from middle-school straight to college.

I'm pretty comfortable with looping, scalars and arrays, simple sorting, that sort of thing, but all of a sudden Sort array according to a value in each element? I needed some really heavy code.

I have an aversion to using code that I don't understand, so I set out to understand the GRT, one chunk at a time.

I learned a lot fast. Next to study is "the empty list technique"...

To help understand the empty list technique, look at this code, guess what it will output, and then try it.

my @a=((),(),());
printf "%d\n", scalar @a;
[download]

List flattening is the key. A little more directly:

printf "%d\n", scalar map {()} 1..3;
[download]

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