I don't know if it would be useful for your purposes, but you might be interested in PDL:

PDL is the Perl Data Language, a perl extension that is designed for scientific and bulk numeric data processing and display. It extends perl's syntax and includes fully vectorized, multidimensional array handling, plus several paths for device-independent graphics output.

PDL is fast, comparable and often outperforming IDL and MATLAB in real world applications. PDL allows large N-dimensional data sets such as large images, spectra, etc to be stored efficiently and manipulated quickly.