It was called Perl 6 and then it went insane.

A complete rewrite of the guts with the cleanup and change of a few warts and with a few additions would make sense and would rightfully be called Perl 6. A bit akin to what Topaz planed to be, but without the decision to use C++. It might even make sense, if the project started a little later, to target the java or .net runtime (think Mono).

It might even have been released about ten years ago while "the inner circle" would be busy writing the synopses of a new megalanguage with a cool codename intended to become the Perl successor sometime in the future or a little later.