[tyingq]

>There are some reasons somebody felt an urge to create perl

Larry Wall (creator of Perl) says something pretty close to that here[1]:

"I was too lazy to do it in awk because it would have been hard to get awk to jump through the hoops I was wanting it to jump through. I was too impatient to wait for awk to finish because it was so slow. And finally, I had the hubris to think I could do better."

[1]http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/3394

[throwaway7645]

I still think Awk is better for one-liners, but Perl gets the advantage for full size programs.