if that is the entire extent of your opinion

Far from it!

I found that particular statement "hilarious" because you seem to waste an inordinate amount of your valuable time italicising, bolding and underscoring your posts. Perhaps you would do better to devote that time to writing and posting code that compiles and runs to produce the required results, which you should also post to demonstrate those skills that you so often allude to. Giving you the benefit of the doubt, you might have done this on occasion but I can't recall any instance where you have.

Going back to the "extemporaneous" solution you originally posted, there's nothing particularly wrong with the approach. The execution, however, leaves a lot to be desired, e.g. initialising my @lines = []; gives us an array whose first element is an empty anonymous array rather than an empty array. The prevalence of these "beginner's" mistakes render those of your posts containing code worthless and dangerously misleading for genuine beginners who visit this site.

I am actually considerably older than 41, having started my IT career in 1977. I am now retired but still enjoy tinkering with code, Perl code in particular, and producing solutions to help others.