heh, stripping blanks off does no good for a real golf ;-)

Sometimes whitespace is necessary so you should strip the unnecessary spaces when you are golfing.

some golfing you could have done seeing that 'length' appears quite often in your routine ;-)

Yes, it does. In each case, though, it is taking the length of something different: once for each of $a and $b in the sort, and once for each of $_ and $W[0] in the grep. So, I'm not sure what you point is. Feel free to share your improvements.

-sauoq
"My two cents aren't worth a dime.";