[protospork]

Thank you, that's a better-written answer than anything I could get down. I'd just like to add that (as the article does a pretty good job of saying) perl is /unparalleled/ as a text-processing language. There is no other language that even comes close to perl's ease and utility for string manipulation.

[timr]

That's a good point. When I think over what I use Perl for in practice, it's usually some form of text processing. Perl is just the swiss army knife of I/O munging.

[sliverstorm]

This is why Perl is my main workhorse. I process text almost exclusively.