Why not post an example of this "very poor style of inserting/formatting text"? Are you talking about HERE DOCS? You can use those both in Perl and shell scripting ... an example of a HERE doc is ...

$ cat <<HEREDOC
> blah blah
>
> blah blha
> HEREDOC
blah blah
                                                                      
+                                                              
blah blha
$ perl
print <<HEREDOC;
blah blha
                                                                      
+                                                              
blah blah
HEREDOC
^D
blah blha
                                                                      
+                                                              
blah blah
$
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