I personally believe that others already correctly confirmed your impression that Perl is perfectly apt for the task you're up to and the only thing I may want to add is that while most people either suggested some sort of handrolled template system or -as in the case of CountZero- of a "real" one, Perl and LaTeX can "go very well together" in another sense too: precisely by means of PerlTeX which basically lets you implement LaTeX macros in Perl and may be or not of your interest for this task, but is certainly worth mentioning anyway. (Also because IMHO it's less known than it should deserve to.)
(Apologies for replying so late.)
