I am currently using Vim's Perl extensions, and it is working just fine.

Check a few practical examples for twisting your text with Perl from inside Vim at Editing features for advanced users under the title Wizardry: editing with Perl.

Just a simple excerpt. You can sort your text using Perl's syntax, getting text from the editor's current buffer and writing back to it:

:perl @lines = sort {$a <=> $b} $curbuf->Get(1 .. 15)
:perl $curbuf->Set(1, @lines)
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update. I must mention that I re-compiled Vim to get that feature working correctly. Instruction for the task at the same node.

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