in reply to Daft text adventure project
I'm not sure this will fit your project exactly, but as a student of text adventure design (truly a lost art nowdays) you definitely should check out Rezrov...
http://www.voicenet.com/~mikeedmo/rezrov/
One of the implementations is in Perl. Basically, Infocomm created their own language for writing adventures. It can do everything from Zork to Tetris.
In Section
Seekers of Perl Wisdom