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The funny thing about this meditation is how closely it parallels the origins of the Schwartzian Transform itself. If I remember my perl lore correctly.....

A beginner posted to c.l.p asking how to sort a file based on the last field in each line. merlyn responded with a brilliant but unexplained snippet that did exactly what was asked for. Tom Christiansen decided that this wasn't particularly helpful, since the newbie couldn't make heads or tails of it (nor could many of the more experienced coders, since it hadn't really been seen before). His response has been immortalized as the FMTEYEWTK about sort article. Rumor has it that this exchange is what lead to the name 'Schwartzian Transform' and that scary looking snippet has become a perl idiom.

Sorry to sidestep your questions... just thought I'd toss a little history in there. If nothing else, you should send the newbie a link to TC's explanation....

-Blake

In reply to Re: Helping Beginners by blakem
in thread Helping Beginners by Ovid

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