Now, tell me... is that not a *lot* easier to comprehend... and more importantly, if you were a maintenance coder... would you not prefer to have to understand these 2 lines of code, rather than the chunk of java?

If I were a Perl maintenance coder, I might prefer something slightly more verbose (but only slightly).

But if I were using this example to wave at Java coders to convince them that Perl will save them grief, I would make it even more verbose, lest it reenforce a notion that Perl is overly cryptic. Past a point, "Look how small we can do this with Perl!" becomes a negative. Instead, present Java programmers with something more familiar.

Something like

  #!/usr/bin/perl -w
  use strict;

  my %frequency = ();    # maps token -> count

  # for every line of every input file
  while ( <> ) {
      # for each token on the line
      foreach my $token ( split /\W/ ) {
          # increment the count for the token
          $frequency{$token}++;
      }
  }

  # print each token and its count
  foreach my $token ( sort keys %frequency ) {
      print "$token: $frequency{$token}\n";
  }
[download]

A bit more verbose than what would automatically fly off the fingertips of a seasoned Perl hacker, but even with comments, it is less than a third the size of the Java example. AND it only uses control structures that a Java programmer should recognize. The only thing they might object to is the hidden use of $_.

(I don't know how TreeMap behaves, so the sort might need to be changed to sort on value.)

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