An excelent point, though I'm not sure we can take it as far as LISP can. There has been some research of late for transparently doing parallel processing in functional languages, which is a really big deal. They can do this because statments in functional languages tend to be highly expressive and self-contained.

For that to be usable in Perl, the rest of the language has to play nicely, too. To do that, the language probably wouldn't look much like Perl anymore. I suspect that a supporting library will still have to be used.