The emacs guru I know (who is out for a few days with a broken foot) has rumored the existence of a perl interpreter in emacs (called e-perl, or something) to "replace" elisp.

My face brightened considerably (since emacsen have never correctly handled Perl indentation), but I have never actually investigated (I usually hate to tinker with tools, and text editors are tools).

Perl would be a much better Perl parser than lisp, don't you think?

;-)

Russ