My reading of the brief information at http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp-windows.html indicates that xampp 1.8.2 includes "Strawberry Perl 5.16.3.1" which suggests either you are using a (much) older version of xampp, or you have a configuration issue.

Windows doesn't take any notice of the #! line at the top of script files, but Apache acts like a *nix a shell and requires the line to figure out what interpreter should be used.