Printing's a rather significant piece of work, though--take a look at the hoops perl potentially has to jump through to do something like "print $foo". ('Specially if $foo is overloaded or tied)

Anyway, while Lisp is rather difficult to optimize in some ways, it's not at all tough to compile. I think you'll find that, for those tasks which fit a Lisp mindset well, Lisp will wipe the floor with perl. If Lisp is running interpreted, then Perl's likely to win for some stuff, but never underestimate the power of compilation...