As I told you in the CB I don't have an answer to this , but I'd like to comment on this:

I realise Perl is not considered by some to be the ideal language to learn this in

I don't think this is necessarily true when studying algorithms. When I was taking my algorithms class, I often found that writing a quick perl program was the easiest way of testing an algorithm for a homework, for example. Perl makes it very easy to write things almost in pseudocode, and it has plenty of high-level operations, so that translating things from an algorithm in the book to working code can be relatively painless. And with tools like Benchmark, at least time measuring is easy.

--ZZamboni