A couple of favorite compact idioms:

    my %hash;
    # initialize all elements to 1
    @hash{ @array } = (1) x @array;

    # assign empty string defaults
    $_ = "" for grep ! defined, ( $foo, $bar, $baz );
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Compactness can be a good thing, but it's important to not golf. 10 lines of code is easier to maintain then 50, but it's going to depend on the skill of the maintainer (who should, but might not, recognize for ( 1..10 ){}) and the quality of the code in question. Ten lines of code is terrible if it doesn't do any sanity checking (if necessary).

Cheers,
Ovid

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Incidentally a couple of days ago I was talking to someone who is doing a PhD in neuro-science. In discussing what thinking is he brought up the same point. He said that the key characteristcs of the thinking process are the production of a compressed model from external stimuli, and then the utilization of that model for prediction. I found it interesting that people who officially study this stuff were thinking along similar lines to what I already suspected was important. That means that even if it is a strange-looking line of thought, it is at least a reasonable one to try...

Anyways, yes. A shared vocabulary of compact idioms does help you communica^Wprogram well. They must be shared between programmers to work well, and certainly not all Perl programmers (not even all experienced ones) can be assumed to know the various corners of Perl. However I believe that the richness of Perl 5, and the greater coming richness of Perl 6, allows for a selection of a limited but highly effective "vocabulary" for the problem spaces most Perl programmers are likely to encounter.

That tends to be a key feature of any expert field, I thought. Criticisms of most 'thought heavy' disciplines often involve a comment about the difficulty of understanding the (unnecessary) jargon.

Practitioners often respond that the jargon is not unnecessary because it clearly and concisely expresses an idea that might otherwise take sentences to express. I think your idea applies well to any intellectual endevour where the ideas are more important than the way they are communicated.

Larry's jokes about LZW compression of a language aren't really jokes when you think about it...

Of course, you're thinking more of the mental structures that are being built to cope with ideas rather than the way they are expressed, but there are some (like myself) who believe that there isn't much difference between what a person says and does and who/what they actually are.

Don't even get me started about my ideas on the way we treat everything in the real world as an object with defined interfaces... I'm taking an analogy a bit too far there.

____________________
Jeremy
I didn't believe in evil until I dated it.

It's not just terseness, it's also that the pieces in Perl fit together. In many other languages I use, I end up with clunky constructs because, for example, a particular statement doesn't evaluate its arguments, and there's no magic "yes, do it now" switch.

Case in point: some code I wrote today has to rewrite a SQL template based on data returned from another query. I have to form a comma-separated list of the values in the first column of the result set, and I need to preserve the original template. (It's an SQL in clause; before I get brow-beaten, I should mention I'm working under "sociological" restrictions.)

Here's what I wrote (paraphrased): ($sql = $templ) =~ s/#LIST#/join ',', map { $_->[0] } @res/e;It's not golf, it's just a nice fit.

I'd be willing to type longer strings to get this, but the fact that I can feed map to join and use it on the RHS of a substitution makes me smile! I shudder to think what I'd have to do to achieve the same thing in, say, VBScript (to pick a particularly nasty example).

Here's one of my own (recent) favorites, which is a variation on Ovid's initializing all elements of an hash to 1:

my %column_num;
my @column_lbls = qw( Id Name SSN Phone FAX );
# initialize a hash with an array index:
@column_num{ @column_lbls } = 0 .. $#column_lbls;

# to find the index of the item matching $col_name:
my $index = $column_lbls{$col_name};

# to find the column numbers of several columns (e.g., a database quer
+y):
my @cols = @column_lbls{ qw(Name Phone FAX) };
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Update: Oh, and don't forget the Orcish Maneuver, another personal favorite.

dmm