Sounds like you have been practicing improvisation. :)

Check out explorations of consciousness and symbolic references... for some more meditations on strict structure versus loose interpretation.

But to answer the question of while Perl seems to lend itself to this style of controlled 'hacking' - I think that has to with the fact that Perl was written by programmers FOR programmers.

Jeff

HMWDYWTDIT
"How Many Ways Do You Want To Do It Today?"