What got me interested in Perl was a Dr Dobbs article that illustrated the power of regular expressions. However, what really impressed me once I started using it was the ease with which one could manipulate strings with substr and the "." operator; so simple after the painful tooth-drawing of strcat, strcpy and their ilk in C. Also what could be achieved in just a few lines of code that would perhaps have taken 50 in another language. Laugh out loud amazing!!

Update: My first use of Perl pre-dated the four argument form of substr and being able to do this was a revelation ...

johngg@aleatico:~$ perl -Mstrict -Mwarnings -E 'say q{};
my $str = q{abcdefg};
say $str;
substr( $str, 3, 0 ) = q{xxxxx};
say $str;'

abcdefg
abcxxxxxdefg
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