Re^2: When you first encountered Perl, which feature amazed you the most?

[cavac]

That, and the feature that you don't have to wrangle data types all the time. I don't mean the usual scalar/array/hash/ref thing in Perl. But more on the "oh, you want bigger numbers? Oh you want signed numbers?" side of things, like having to rewrite larger parts of the codebase because suddenly your database ID's need 64 bits instead of 32 bits...