You know, it doesn't really surprise me that perl isn't always optimal for golf. I've seen it in action in that fibonacci golf tingy at Re: Fibo Golf challenge on 3 monkeys and (OT) Fibonacci numbers in Ruby - final shot - 24 chars etc. Also, when I write one-liners, which I do a lot, and I don't golf on purpose, the ruby ones always turn out to be shorter than the perl ones, only the ruby ones get hard to manage earlier when they grow. Ruby just has a larger, better standard library for basic things, but cpan wins when you need more complicated stuff like xml parsing.
As for ruby,
did you look at that golf prelude thingy in ruby-1.9.0? I never tried it, but I've seen it's there. It has some methods and stuff (like Integer.each instead of Integer.times) defined in such a way to ease golfing but that you wouldn't want to use in sane code, and it also defines the equivalent of AUTOLOAD so you can abbreviate methods to the shortest unique prefix or something. I've no idea how you're supposed to use it officially, but it's in file golf_prelude.c, which is called by goruby.c, which I guess you compile to a goruby executable using some hidden makefile switch or something. (Update: though in 1.9.0 you lose the Kernel#getc method that was already depreciated in 1.8.5.)
