Schwartzian Transform

Sorting by a computed field.
Don't sort the values and compute the field for each comparison. That involves needless comparisons.

Precompute and sort by the precomputed values:

@out = map { $_->[0] } sort { $a->[1] <=> $b->[1] } map { [ $_, length $_ ] } @in;

Not necessarily faster. Increased memory allocation might slow it down more than the precomputation speeds it up.

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YAPC 2000: Stages of a Perl Programmer - 40