Well, ultimately, any language that can implement a Turing machine could be said to be "like" Perl.

But it's pretty easy to define some higher level categories of languages and Perl won't fall into all of the categories. For example, Perl very quickly decategorizes away from Prolog. And depending on how you slice it, I suppose Perl isn't all that much like Smalltalk, or Lisp, or Icon.

That's not to say you can't borrow knowledge of problem-solving from these languages. That's more to say that you can't as easily just take a program written in one of those languages and implement it in the same number of lines of Perl with a high correlation between the lines, as you can say with C or Pascal.

It's too early in the morning for me to recall the "big 4" breakdown... I'm sure tilly will chime in. Something like "functional", "declarative", "procedural", blah blah. (Ahh yes, a Super Search yields Why I like functional programming, go see.)

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker