Perl is a sophisticated interpreted language providing rich facilities for data manipulation out of the box. Many people refer to it as a "high level" language for that reason and because it uses reference counted memory management. It has inherited large components of its syntax from C and large chunks of its richness from several other languages. It provides dynamically typed scalar variables, dynamically sized arrays of scalars, hashes of scalars keyed by strings and a variety of more exotic scalar types. Perl does not provide pointers, but scalars may be assigned references to various entities (including arrays, hashes and subroutines). Perl is written in C and is relatively easily ported to new systems. Perl applications can be highly portable including between different operating systems.

C is a simple compiled language providing a small number of fundamental types and no I/O at all. Much of C's utility is provided by a fairly standard set of functions supplied in the C Runtime Library (CRL) along with the compiler. C provides a rich set of arithmetic and logic operators (which Perl inherits). C does not provide any dynamic data structures (not even a string type), although the CRL provides ways of allocating and disposing chunks of memory under programmer control. C provides various integer types, fixed size arrays, structs, unions and pointers. C is easy to implement on new systems and is thus often the language of choice for bootstrapping new systems. C applications can be highly portable but tend to be more affected by CRL implementation details than Perl.