Perl doesn't care how long or short your code is. As a general rule, aim for readability, not brevity.

From long experience, and especially from several years of writing medical and aerospace software: Optimize your code for readability, because most of the time, you will READ your (or someone else's) code. And more often than you will like, you will have to read old, ugly code from people who wanted to outsmart compiler and/or coworkers. And the worst code will be your own old code.

Alexander