Tell him you'll write a prototype in Perl, and if that turns out not to be fast enough,
you'll recode the critical parts in C, thanks to Perl's sophisticated interlanguage binding and runtime profiling tools.
HEHEHEHE, ok, I am going to take a few --'s for posting such a vapid post... but hot damn. I cracked up when I read this... that is SUCH a great way to sneak Perl into an organization.
Geek talking to manager...
"Don't worry, we won't be using any of those dirty open source tools here for our production system, we're just using them to prototype..."
6 weeks later...
"It turns out that Perl was 5 times faster and I was able to do it in 1/3rd the time... maybe we should extend your great vision in alowing me to use open source to prototype to our production environment, thereby showing a cost savings and helping our company!"