Why not just use the real thing, and code in Perl? Besides if you're doing anything "sane" someone probably already did it and uploaded it to CPAN. For example, if you're writing your very own XML parser you're probably doin it wrong, just select one from CPAN and be done with it. I've done innumerable jobs which appear complicated but boil down to "use" two (or more) weird apparently unrelated things from CPAN and set one equal to another, rolled up in some initialization and error handling code.