I'm speculating, but maybe there's a communication problem here.

Indeed there's been a communication problem, due to my wanna-be-witty concise expression. Thus it's definitely been my "fault". OTOH I understood perfectly well what zentara meant.

Perhaps zentara meant that C is the language that is closest to Perl, rather than the other way around?

Indeed zentara wrote (clearly enough) and (thus) meant that "Perl is closer to C, than any other language he has seen". In the original context this was just to say that it is very C-like as opposed to DOS batch programming, which is very C-unlike. Incidentally, I wholeheartedly agree. My followup, of course, had nothing to do with that context, which is also the reason why I changed the Subject.