If you're asking this question, you're lacking historical perspective. Perl 1 was released in 1987. Perl 4 was release in March 1991. Perl 5 was released in October 1994. It was at this point that Perl became a really serious language (not that it didn't stop people doing some pretty incredible things with Perl 4).
Parallel to that, C++ first went under that name (rather than the more informal C with Classes moniker that Stroustrup used) in 1983. This predates Perl development. On the other hand ANSI standardisation of the language didn't start until 1990, and wasn't completed until November 1997.
I remember those years. Zortech C++ and Microsoft C++ on DOS/Windows, cfront on Unix, all wildly different allowed syntaxes. What worked on one compiler would dump core on another. One had to write in a highly restricted subset of C++ if one wanted portability. There were no templates. There were no exceptions. (That previous sentence may be read at two levels :)
What this all means is that the earliest vaguely possible opportunity to write Perl in C++ would have been from the transition from 4 to 5. At the time, however, C++ compiler technology was still far too immature. It's as simple as that. The Perl 5 Porters would have spent far more time chasing down C++ oddities than making progress on the Perl core. That's why C was chosen. It was already a mature platform and there weren't many portability issues that abusing the macro preprocessor couldn't solve.
I can't speak for the other languages.
In reply to Re: Mother of Perl (history of Perl in a nutshell)
by grinder
in thread Mother of Perl
by Anonymous Monk
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