The first version of Perl was basically combining many Unix tools together into one language, along with features from C, so that they are easier to use togethe

The first version of Perl was basically combining many Unix tools together into one language, along with features from C, so that they are easier to use together. In fact there are two flip-flop operators that exist in Perl 5, one which works like the one in awk `..` , and the other like the one in sed `...`. Perl 6 renames them to `ff` and `fff`. I remember hearing/reading that the release of Perl was delayed until a2p and s2p were written, specifically for people who used awk and sed to be able to get going quickly in Perl.