Perl is the Practical Extraction and Report Language, or more affectionately the Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister. It is a widely used language, available on nearly any platform, including RISC OS - a port is available to download from http://www.flirble.org/~nick/P/.
 

Unfortunately, Perl on RISC OS is statically linked and an application, which means not only can we not use many of the CPAN Perl extension modules that involve dynamic linking, but also a copy of the Perl executable has to start up every time a Perl program is run, leading to a significant pause in execution of every script.