Darn. I was proud of the @{[]} trick I hacked together for this problem, too bad it scored so poorly. Ah well, thanks for the benchmarks extremely, and congrats on the promotion. {g}

This kind of reminds me of a show on A&E I caught a few minutes of the other day. It had Jeremy Irons in it and he was trying to rebuild an old clock, either from an old schematic or model, I'm not sure which. At any rate, it was one of the first shipboard clocks, one to counteract the effect the swaying deck had on the pendulum. At one point, he becomes irate, saying "...it's a terrible mess, layer and layer of complexity, one piece correcting for the last. The man absolutely refused to admit he was wrong and come up with other concepts." Or something to that effect. =)

I just thought that fit nicely in with this. Presented with a problem and current behavior (m//g returns a list of matched values in list context) I used the ol' hammer-and-nail routine. It seemed to work well enough and made absolute sense to me. But some other folks went back to the root of the problem and came up with completely different solutions that worked from an oblique angle. Look at mirod's solution, for example, something I would have never even thought of. Amazing.

The nature of Perl, I suppose...

'kaboo