I am actually sceptical about this kind of prospect for promoting Perl. Perl is seen as a complicated language. Which is true. I would think that anyone smart enough to code Perl would be smart enough to be able to install another programming language on their computer. I would rather think that Wal-Mart customers are not the highly skilled programmers. Think about it this way: Microsoft Word has had Visual Basic support for ages -- how many Word users know Visual Basic?

The only thing that this would be good for is encouraging software writers to wrtie in Perl, because the platform would be already installed on the machine. But how many unixes ship without Perl these days anyway?

Now if we could slip Perl into the standard Windows distribution...