in reply to PERL Monks! Lend me your wisdom - Program Monitor

If you are running a Unix flavour, then there's already a process which can do that. It's called init, and it will always be there. Just add something like the following to your /etc/inittab:
PM:345:respawn:/path/to/your/program
and tell init:
telinit q
See also man 5 inittab and man 8 init for specific details of your platform.