Here the humble thoughts of an acolyte *. I think the answer lies in what I remember of Learning Perl (hi, merlyn). To paraphrase quite freely, perl is just a fusion of some powerful unix tool, with a large bonus. The sum is more than the elements, that kind of stuff. Whenever you pass things around in file-handle's, chances are that perl can do it the most efficient.

To reason the other way around, what are the most powerful features of perl? For me, I'm using perl mostly for data analysis (read: messing around with textfiles), the regex comes first. Second is, being able to write a lot of powerful things without assigning anything to a variable. I think it is a very cool thing to code using only one variable, the variable you need! Compare that with the total number of variables you would need in C or Java to, for example, count the total number of lowcase characters in a file.

Jeroen

* Hmm. I should look that word up in a dictionary, no ***** idea what the actual meaning is.
I was dreaming of guitarnotes that would irritate an executive kind of guy (FZ)