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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