Ok, there has been a lot of posts about Active State vs Strawberry Perl on Windows. I am a happy Active State user - others have different opinions.

Your Perl programs will run on all of this stuff!
I have a number of Perl programs that routinely run on the MAC OS (current one is *nix based), various versions of Windows (Win2K,WinXP,Win7,etc) and various flavors of Unix - all of which are using various flavors of Perl installations.

Perl is an an amazingly portable source code language.

The next question is what sort of "development environment" should I use? That question is probably more important than the particular "flavor of Perl" that you are using.

I personally use "dinosaur technology" for Perl - just a program text editor - textpad. There are other similar ones Notepad++.

I have function keys defined to run a Perl, C, C++ or Java Program from the current text window and capture the output in another text window. Works pretty well, but not well all the time. I have MS visual studio tools for more complex C++ and assembly language projects. And Eclipse for Java.

Anyway, I think the question of "ok, I've got some kind of Perl on my Windows machine...now how do I use this critter?" is relevant and probably more important than what "flavor" of Perl you have. Maybe you should start a whole new thread on that subject.