Others (especially Maclir) have provided excellent comments, but I just wanted to add that while Perl may "spoil" you for using some other languages, knowing what Perl can do may give you a desire to know how Perl does it, and if you can understand the inner workings of Perl ("pluck the source from Larry's hand") by the time you graduate university, then you will really have an advantage!

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I'd like to be able to assign to an luser