The trouble with trying to win a contest based on program length is that it will lead you to write nasty code that reinforces people's opinions about Perl being hard to read. The first things to go in Perl golf are "use strict" and "use warnings", which is not something I want to see when trying to demonstrate that Perl is mature enough to be used for serious projects. (I know, the example given above is entirely reasonable, but "I can make my program shorter" is a slippery slope.)