The only reason to avoid Perl is that the student who is to do this project might not be familiar with it and has only a limited amount of time to complete it. Futhermore, the result is supposed to be used in real world applications and hence should be as easy and simple to maintain as possible. Adding an extra layer of complexity won't improve that.

So thanks for the suggestion which is interesting, but I don't think we'll go that way.

Thanks, -gjb-