And here you have the code, finally crafted after 37 steps of development.

Looks more like 37 hours sleepless, uninterrupted hacking.

Is this a joke? If so, I didn't get it.

I think this is unmaintainable, "write-only code". Here's why:

• Chaotic indent. 2 spaces, 4, 6, 10, 14, 18, with no obvious rules when and how indenting happens.
• Random amount of whitespace around operators
• Extra long lines (33% have more than 80 chars) full of commands - Perl ain't MUMPS, stuffing as much code as possible into a single line does not make the code faster.
• perl 4 function calls with & prefix - my favorite. The last Perl 4 release was about 20 years ago (4.036 released 1993-Feb-05).
• Comments all over the place, but rarely useful. Hardly readable even with syntax highlighting. What is the relation of "use warnings" and "CPANnn" or "a big ABuse of Data::Dump::Streamer"?
• String evals. Evaluating unverified data read from the network. Twice.

This really looks like code copied from about 3 or 4 different examples, hastily glued together after too much coffee and severe sleep deprivation.

perltidy with default options expands this mess from 100 to 160 lines, slightly more readable, but still ugly.

perlcritic --brutal emits 130 warnings, 1.3 warnings per line, recommends refactoring. perlcritic --harsh still emits 28 warnings, still recommends refactoring. Even perlcritic --gentle does not remain silent.

Alexander