I once had friend who avoided perl because 'there's no such thing as ANSI perl'

This is an oversimplistic way to look at things, and it rather misses the point. Perl5 is significantly more standardised than ANSI C, in terms of behaving the same way on different platforms (assuming you avoid constructs that the Camel specifically warns are inherently unportable).

Sure, there are some differences from one version to another, but if you restrict yourself to what is documented in the 2nd edition Camel (and avoid the aforementioned inherently-unportable things, such as backticks and link, and hardcoded filenames and paths), it will pretty much run unmodified and with the same semantics on any version from 5.003 forward, on any operating system that has Perl5 (except that fork, as documented, won't work on single-tasking OSes).

The same thing is not true for ANSI C.