Re^4: Golf: reverse sort /etc/passwd by UID

[thundergnat]

Notice that your input is already "sorted". All that one liner does is reverse it.

[Tommy]

Noted. Re-reading perldoc -f sort reveals that the sort of "magic" I thought I was seeing wasn't the case. $a and $b are package globals explicitly passed by Perl itself to the sort block (or subroutine of your definition). It's not a bare leftside-rightside comparison of whatever expressions you may provide. You have to explicitly use the $a and $b package global symbols, and $_ isn't $a/$b. Them's the rules.

I do indeed stand corrected.