I'd like to comment on Perl as a programmming language.

Perl is a programming language with many built in commands, many different ways of doing things and aiming at many different problem areas. This is mostly considered a Good Thing in the Perl community.

As such, Perl provides you a lot. OTOH, and IMHO, Perl also require quite a lot from the programmer. Agreed, it is very easy to write a small script to solve a small and well defined problem. But when you start to write something big and/or complex, there are numerous ways of getting confused.

Perl gives freedom to the developer. Freedom has a price and the cost is responsibility. Perl puts you in the front seat. You drive. So chose your road visely. Perl will not stop you from going off the cliff. Or into the rock wall.
Good Perl is better or as good as good code in most (any?) other language. Bad Perl code is a disaster.

If you're experiencing problems with infinite loops in your daily work I see two potential solutions:

1. Invest your own time, interest and involvement in a language like Perl. Study a lot. Take time to learn. You will be rewarded for serious efforts.
2. Chose a more limited language. A language that will guide you while typing. Visual Basic comes to mind with it's syntax parsing IDE.

Now, these are only opinions. But they come from having programmed in many different languages. And from having passed the 'newbie' level in Perl, still without being able to call myself an expert in Perl. Experienced maybe, but not an expert.

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Everything went worng, just as foreseen.