Why Perl?

• There is a large base of Perl code available on the net.
• The string matching will knock your socks off. For instance, you can catch and interpret clock times very compactly:

  if($l =~ m/([012]?[0-9]):([0-5][0-9])(:[0-5][0-9])?\s*([a-z0-9.+-]+)/i
          && is_ampm($4))
  

  will catch 06:20:00 AM, 06:20AM, 05:30 EDT, 13:32 GMT+0500, and 07:15 a.m., split out the hours, minutes, seconds, and timezone, and pass the timezone to a is_ampm() function for verification.
• String modification is also powerful. For instance,

  s/\b(brows\w+)/fiddle($1)/eg;
  

  will find words beginning with 'browse', feed them into a function fiddle(), and substitute the output of fiddle back into the string.
• Database access is built in. The tie() function can connect an associative array to a database package, so that array references are transparently mapped into database accesses. For instance,

  tie(%h, GDBM_File, "database_filename", &GDBM_READER, 0600);
  if( $h{$username, likes_spaghetti} )	{
  	print "$username likes spaghetti\n";
  	}
  untie(%h);
  

  is a minimalist program to access a database_filename to find out if someone likes spaghetti. The array reference -- $h{xxx} -- gets mapped into a lookup of the value associated with the key 'xxx'.
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