Honourable Monks,
I need some powerful expressions in order to reduce code and avoiding intermediate variables or importing modules.
Suppose an array of strings which are to be printed as a matrix. The array is

my (@b) = qw(un deux trois quatre jedan dva tri
tcheteri  one two three );
[download]

First, how do I find the biggest string length? Does anybody have any command shorter then

my ($max) = sort {$b <=> $a} map length, @a;
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Secondly, I want the array printed or displayed in columns as "tight" as possible and _justified left_. I don't manage justifying left with sprintf(). Let's choose 4 columns. Knowing $max, the shortest I manage is:

my $col=4;
for(@b){ $_ = substr($_ . ' ' x $max, 0, $max +1)}
@a = @b;
for (;@a;){print splice (@a, 0, $col),"\n"}
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An awful solution because I destroy the array and the aliasing substr($_ . ' ' x $max, 0, $max +1) is horrible. Better solutions are welcome :-) Finally, I want to "transpose" the previous display, or to "shuffle" it. The best I find is

@a = @b;
my @c;
for (;@a;){
  my @b = splice (@a, 0, $col);
  map {push @{$c[$_]}, $b[$_];
     } (0 .. $#b);
}
map {print @$_,"\n"} @c;
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Really disgusting. I want prettier code. The code in one slurp:

use strict;
use warnings;
my (@a) = my (@b) = qw(un deux trois quatre jedan dva tri tcheteri  on
+e two three );
print "@a\n";
my ($max) = sort {$b <=> $a} map length, @a;
print "max=$max\n";
my $col=4;
for(@b){ $_ = substr($_ . ' ' x $max, 0, $max +1)}
@a = @b;
for (;@a;){print splice (@a, 0, $col),"\n"}
print "\ntrasnsposed\n\n";
@a = @b;
my @c;
for (;@a;){
  my @b = splice (@a, 0, $col);
  map {push @{$c[$_]}, $b[$_];
     } (0 .. $#b);
}
map {print @$_,"\n"} @c;
[download]

Thank you for looking at this!

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