volka wrote:listen to me
s.t.a.y a.w.a.y f.r.o.m p.e.r.l

Bah! Perl is a great language, infact I tend to use Perl more than I use PHP, although that's probably because I've been using Perl
alot longer than I've been using PHP.
Perl - Practical Extraction & Reporting Language / Pathalogically Eclectic Rubbish Lister - is a language optimized for scanning arbitrary text files, extracting information from those text files, and printing reports based on that information. It's also a good language for many system management tasks. The language is intended to be practical (easy to use, efficient, complete) rather than beautiful (tiny, elegant, minimal).
Perl combines (in the author's opinion, anyway) some of the best features of C, sed, awk, and sh, so people familiar with those languages should have little difficulty with it. (Language historians will also note some vestiges of csh, Pascal, and even BASIC-PLUS.) Expression syntax corresponds closely to C expression syntax. Unlike most Unix utilities, Perl does not arbitrarily limit the size of your data--if you've got the memory, Perl can slurp in your whole file as a single string. Recursion is of unlimited depth. And the tables used by hashes (sometimes called "associative arrays") grow as necessary to prevent degraded performance. Perl can use sophisticated pattern matching techniques to scan large amounts of data quickly. Although optimized for scanning text, Perl can also deal with binary data, and can make dbm files look like hashes. Setuid Perl scripts are safer than C programs through a dataflow tracing mechanism that prevents many stupid security holes.
If you have a problem that would ordinarily use sed or awk or sh, but it exceeds their capabilities or must run a little faster, and you don't want to write the silly thing in C, then Perl may be for you. There are also translators to turn your sed and awk scripts into Perl scripts.
If you want to learn Perl, I suggest you buy a copy of the
Perl Black Book and
Programming Perl (3rd Ed.). I actually learnt Perl from my father many, many years ago (When I was about 6). It's a really easy language to pick up if you're already familiar with another C-based language, so seeing as you already know PHP, it'll be a breeze!
Also, most servers that provide PHP hosting will provide Perl hosting as well - So check up with your current host first before you go in search of another host. And in my travels I've found a free ASP hosting service; check out
http://www.brinkster.com/.