If you're bent on including Perl code in your templates, you can also use PLP, which is a templating engine that allows that.

There are many discussions of the benefits and drawbacks of the various templating systems. I have a (short, German) comparison of templating systems in my Advanced Perl Techniques tutorial on slide 158 (no direct linking in this version of S5, sorry), and Mason ranks high up there in terms of power and perlishness. You should question yourself though how much power you need in the template side of things. Even PHP, which basically is Mason for purposes of this discussion, went the route of having its own templating systems instead of using pure PHP. Using a templating system forces you to separate data munging , business logic and displaying, and IMO that's why a powerful templating system is a danger because you will end up implementing business logic in the display templates.