It's pretty common in Perl scripting to have a hash of values, and to want to get the values as a list sorted by the keys. (Actually, that's often why you created the hash in the first place.
Suppose you have a hash like so:
my %things = (
ddd => 'Dennis',
ttt => 'Tom',
mmm => 'Mickey',
aaa => 'Albert',
To get the values as a list sorted by the keys, the usual suggested method is this:
my @list;
foreach (sort keys %things) {
push @list, $things{$_};
}
which is fine, and has the advantage of being totally obvious to anyone reading your code.
But there is another method which will do the same thing in one line:
my @list = map { "$things{$_}" } sort keys %things;
As I said, trivial, but worth documenting for others. And isn't every program just a collection of trivial elements?
