I fear that the whole obfu-perl was a direct descendant of my original JAPH tweaks: at least it would be hard to prove the contrary.

And as you point out, it detracts from the fact that there are far more clearly written readable Perl programs in the world than there are obfu-perl "programs". But what gets noticed is the ugly stuff. {sigh}

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker