I know. So does OCaml. Perl is a lot closer in character to sed and awk than Python is, though. That's all. I really dislike Perl, but I'm quite happy with using Python for general scripting and using sed for quick regex piping tasks. If I used Perl instead of Python, I probably wouldn't bother using sed.
Perl has a lot of syntactic sugar for quick-and-dirty regex stuff, derived directly from sed and awk, while Python instead has sugar for list slicing, dictionaries, etc., but uses function syntax (e.g., re.search(pattern, string)) for regexes. I would rather have great syntax for lists and dicts, personally.
