First, I agree with what has been said by merlyn and the majority of the other posters: in general, your question can't be answered, since it is meaningless without mentioning a concrete problem.

This said, one could argue that Perl is not as well suited to recursive solutions as some other languages are, since it's function call implementation places a comparatively large load on the system in terms of memory and execution speed. Perl is simply not optimized for recursion, but for other operations (e.g., text manipulation and file IO).

For some more exact data on this, have a look at Timing Trials, or, the Trials of Timing: Experiments with Scripting and User-Interface Languages, a research paper that compares the performance of C, Awk, Perl, Tcl, Java, Visual Basic, Limbo and Scheme on different platforms for loops and arithmetic, function calls (using the heavily recursive Ackermann function), arrays and strings, associative data structures, input/output, graphical user interfaces, and compilation vs. interpretation.

Christian Lemburg
Brainbench MVP for Perl
http://www.brainbench.com