Hopefully that's because a good Perl hacker would write:

    perl -E 'say map { chr } 119, 101, 39, 114, 101, 32, 104, 105, 114, 105, 110, 103'

perl -e "print map {chr} 119, 101, 39, 114, 101, 32, 104, 105, 114, 105, 110, 103;"

is the best my version can do. I still need to read more of that book of yours. And update my install: neither say nor -E exist.

You need at least Perl 5.10 (and 5.12.3 should be out shortly). If your OS vendor has an older version installed, see App::perlbrew to install your own updated version independent of the system Perl 5.

Indeed. I don't think we have any actively maintained code written in Perl. I know a lot of plumbing written in it, but it's not in need of new features.

Sounds like it was written by a good Perl hacker if it still just works and nobody has needed to maintain it after all this time.

perl -e 'print pack("c*", 119, 101, 39, 114, 101, 32, 104, 105, 114, 105, 110, 103)'