in reply to Orcish Maneuver
in thread Would you use 'goto' here?
The Orcish Maneuver is a term coined by Joseph Hall in his book "Effective Perl Programming" (co-authored by merlyn). Here's the essence of it:
my @sorted = sort { ( $times{$a} ||= -M $a ) <=> ( $times{$b} ||= -M $b ) } @old_array;
The "orcish" (a bad attempt at humor: "or cache") maneuver basically caches the results of an expensive lookup using the ||= operator. This operator says, in the above code, that $times{$a} will be evaluated or, if it is false, set it to the value of -M $a. (-M is the file test operator for last modified time). This allows you to cache the results of -M rather than call it every time. This has the same effect as:
for ( @old_array ) { $times{ $_ } = -M $_; } my @sorted = sort { $times{$a} <=> $times{$b} } @old_array;
Cheers,
Ovid
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