Greetings, Monks. I'm a struggling novice who has recently completed the exercises in the "Learning Perl" book. In an effort to further my perl knowledge, I've been devising small challenges for myself to complete, most pertaining to hashes (since I'm a bit fuzzy in that regard). I'm now seeking to interchange the smallest hash value of a hash with the largest hash value. Here's my code:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use Data::Dumper;

my %hash = (Matt => 24,
            Dana => 19,
            Eric => 28,
            Sara => 20,
            John => 17,
            Mike => 23,);

print Dumper \%hash;

my @sort = sort {$hash{$a} <=> $hash{$b}} keys %hash;
my $temp = $hash{$sort[scalar @sort - 1]};
$hash{$sort[scalar @sort - 1]} = $hash{$sort[0]};
$hash{$sort[0]} = $temp;

print Dumper \%hash;
[download]

This accomplishes what I want (interchanging the key John value with the key Eric value), but seems rather cumbersome. Is the array of sorted keys by value (@sort) really necessary? I'm seeking a more elegant solution. Thanks for any help.

Matt