Some Perl

A buddy of mine sent me a Perl question on AIM. He wanted to count words from STDIN. That is, he wanted to have snippet of Perl that would count the frequency of each word. Presumably he intends to use it in some larger application.

I helped him with his version, then thought about it a little more, realizing I could write something a little shorter, albeit not very efficient. My solution looked something like this:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;

my @words = <>;
chomp @words;
my %count = map {
    my $word = $_;
    $word => scalar grep {$_ eq $word} @words;
} @words;
print "$_ was seen $count{$_} times\n" foreach (sort keys %count);

I was actually kind of proud of that. I know, it's not terribly efficient to have grep inside map, but you gotta admit there's a certain elegance to it...