Perl of the Third Kind

Points to Dan, who not only reads my blog, but points out that in a recent post on serious Perl I mentioned that there are three ways to view Perl but only elaborated on two of them.

Here now I present the third way to view Perl:

#!/bin/perl -sp0777i<X+d*lMLa^*lN%0]dsXx++lMlN/dsM0<j]dsj
$/=unpack('H*',$_);$_=`echo 16dio\U$k"SK$/SM$n\EsN0p[lN*1
lK[d2%Sa2/d0$^Ixp"|dc`;s/\W//g;$_=pack('H*',/((..)*)$/)

Believe it or not, this line noise is actually a program, one that a human being sat down and figured out how to do the task and found a very, very optimal way to execute that task without the overhead of pesky things like comprehensibility. Once you've mastered Perl as a programming language, you get down to this level of language mastery: hacking the language and the interpreter itself. If you have some time, read the explanation of this script and gaze in awe at the sheer, crypitcally dense optimization of it all.

Then contemplate that there is an even smaller, more cryptic version that no one has yet been able to fully document.