Thank you for your greater elaboration, and kind words, Laurent_R.
I'm afraid it is me, that should excuse myself. Indeed, I did misinterpret your meaning. It seems my skills in the Laurent_R language, need improvement. ;)
Seriously, I'm terribly sorry for misinterpreting your intent. I hope you will not think ill of me, because of it.

"One final point: you might want to look at s2p (sed to Perl) and psed (and a2p, awk to Perl), I would think that they might help you do in Perl what you know how to do in sed and don't yet know how to do in Perl. In addition, looking at the code of these conversion utilities may give you some ideas for your own PHP to Perl project (even though this a much more ambitious project)."
Greatly appreciated advise. Thank you very much, Laurent_R. I look forward to spending a great deal of time with them -- soon!

Thank you again, Laurent_R, for taking the time to respond.

--Chris

#!/usr/bin/perl -Tw
use Perl::Always or die;
my $perl_version = (5.12.5);
print $perl_version;