horses for courses. how many lines of code do you have to write (from scratch btw) to achieve basic regular expression matching capability for a small project? i guess you'd call it a big project in C, and a one or two-liner in Perl. the open style of the perl language allows for flexibility in expressing a solution to a problem...with structured languages it's all about declaring the correct size variables and watching that you de-allocate what you allocate first. as perl was written for the domain of text processing, with thousands of modules written, you don't have to re-invent the wheel.