Of course you are quite right, and to some extent I did these things, but there was some difficulty in getting a good Perl (version > 3) for VMS at that time, and for reasons I won't get in to we could not compile Perl ourselves... I guess that gets back to the earlier point on having similar Perls on each platform.

As a testament to Perl, in some of the VAX work Perl was used to replace Fortran code for translating Fortran binary data structures to ASCII for dumping to PCs, and it was a heck of a lot easier to use than Fortran!