Rocco Caputo pointed me to a Perl job opportunity the other day that was pretty, umm, demanding. I always wondered ... how could anyone possibly write that much code in one day? Apparently, your best bet is to go the whole IHBLRIA route and rewrite things like the lc() function, as Edy's colleague demonstrates:

sub utl {
$i = $_[0];
$i =~ s#A#a#gsi;
$i =~ s#B#b#gsi;
$i =~ s#C#c#gsi;
$i =~ s#D#d#gsi;
$i =~ s#E#e#gsi;
$i =~ s#F#f#gsi;
$i =~ s#G#g#gsi;
$i =~ s#H#h#gsi;
$i =~ s#I#i#gsi;
$i =~ s#J#j#gsi;
$i =~ s#K#k#gsi;
$i =~ s#L#l#gsi;
$i =~ s#M#m#gsi;
$i =~ s#N#n#gsi;
$i =~ s#O#o#gsi;
$i =~ s#P#p#gsi;
$i =~ s#Q#q#gsi;
$i =~ s#R#r#gsi;
$i =~ s#S#s#gsi;
$i =~ s#T#t#gsi;
$i =~ s#U#u#gsi;
$i =~ s#V#v#gsi;
$i =~ s#W#w#gsi;
$i =~ s#X#x#gsi;
$i =~ s#Y#y#gsi;
$i =~ s#Z#z#gsi;
return $i;
}

And all this time I thought the whole point of Perl was to see how much cryptic logic you could stuff in one line.

Offtopic, if anyone has a way (.NET) to convert a hashtable of strings to and from a byte array, without using a BinaryFormatter, please do share. I've been meaning to do it for weeks, and just don't have the time It's for the new, improved site -- I'm stuck with going the restricted shared route as a single-processor licence of SQL Server 2000 ($2500) is a bit more than I'd like to spend. Maybe when 2005 comes out.

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