Okay I think I've worked out the basic structure. The heredoc gets split into an array of words, then every fourth word (the %4) is printed - puny and vast are Pirate for lc and uc, so the fourth words "just another Perl PIRATE" get re-cased and printed. I'm not sure what "squint at the dubloons" (Pirate for "study $_") does. I'm sure I've read about study somewhere, but perldoc doesn't know anything about it. Something to do with optimising a regex?