Actually yes - perl has a tainted mode (#!/usr/bin/perl -t) that force you to sanitize every input from the outside world. It does not do the work for you because it is agnostic to semantics (escaping for shell is different than escaping for SQL for example) but at least make you think about the problem.
So what you are saying, is that it's not actually widely used, or even useful in the scope of a web site? In that case, it don't see how it changes my original point.
