I've had to spend quite a bit of time with Ruby lately and coming from Perl it's easy to see how much Matz has borrowed. I've also been drawn to functional programming and am about to embark on my first Common Lisp journey after re-reading Higher Order Perl. This book left me wondering which functional programming features Perl supports that Ruby doesn't as MJD didn't feel qualified to comment, I read somewhere. I've heard it argued both ways, for example, that Ruby's blocks are not real closures like Perl's lexical closures. So, can any of you who know Perl and Ruby well enlighten me as to what advantages Perl has in functional programming compared with Ruby?