to DO or not to DO, that is the question

Following on from yesterdays post about do blocks, this is what I would normally do off the bat:

sub word_freq {
    my %words;
    $words{$_}++ for split /\s+/, lc $_[0];
    \%words;
}

Returning back a hash reference is both leaner and meaner

use List::Util qw(sum);

my $s = "The green hat is tHe twin of the green hat";

my $num_of_hats = word_freq( $s )->{ hat };   # word count just for 'hat'

# don't worry... always unique hashrefs returned:
my $hash_ref    = word_freq( $s );
my $hash_ref2   = word_freq( $s );       

# thus you can safely:
$hash_ref2->{green} = 100;
say "$hash_ref->{green} : $hash_ref2->{green}"; # => "2 : 100"    

# clean copy for those who prefer there hashes not to be hashrefs!
my %hash = %{ word_freq( $s ) };       

# returns ( 'is', 'of')
my @two_letter_words  = grep { length $_ == 2 } keys %{ word_freq( $s ) };

# number of "green" + "hat" == 4
my $green_plus_hat = sum @{ word_freq( $s ) }{ qw/green hat/ };

And what I probably wouldn’t do is:

use List::MoreUtils qw(uniq);

my $s = "The green hat is tHe twin of the green hat";

my %words = do {
    my @words = split /\s+/, lc $s;
    map { 
        my $word = $_; 
        $word => scalar grep { $_ eq $word } @words;
    } uniq @words
};

I actually prefer the code aesthetics of this but the extra cycle (grep) through @words pushes me towards the leaner hash counting solution. Horses for courses?

/I3az/