While I can see how Stephen is looking at this as an obfuscation-in-progress, and others are looking at it as just plain obfuscated, this type of thing is a great example of why I love playing around with Perl. Don't get me wrong, I certainly thought merlyn had left out a few lines when I first looked at it, but after a couple of minutes it really started to look beautiful (I'm sick, I know...). In this fine example, merlyn:
- didn't redefine any defaults
- didn't use any obscure, poorly documented features
- didn't even use single-letter variable names
- heck, it's even full of wasted spaces

He simply made excellent use of the well-documented default behaviours which even I use every day. It still amazes me that St.Larry (and some Perl elves) thought up all these behaviours which often look odd to me at first, but eventually dovetail together so well it's hard to imagine all of these uses weren't considered. Maybe after I've been here long enough I'll be able to come up with better ways to fit the parts together too.

--
I'd like to be able to assign to an luser