> With that, I'm almost willing to say that anything Scheme can do, Perl
> can do better. Almost. The problem is that Perl uses reference
Perl is fat, while Scheme is not (ever tried writing a silicon
compiler dumping a Perl chip VHDL in Perl? While Lisp machines are
gone, people are writing bootable Scheme OSses). Scheme has true gc,
while Perl doesn't. Scheme is easy to parse and to compile -- don't
try this with Perl at home, kids. Scheme has no syntax troubles. Most
Scheme stuff can optimize tail-recursion. As Forth, Scheme is a
steep-hierarchy language, letting you define application languages and
writing the application.
I don't think that Perl is at all comparable to Scheme, oh no.
It is certainly comparable to Python. It is apparently quite easy to
embed Perl in Python, or to send CPAN stuff to Perl processes. Of
course this would work both ways.