Perl comes preinstalled on Linux, Solaris, AIX, and HP-UX, including older versions of those OS's.
I contend that Perl is so widespread that Autotools could replace its Bourne shell scripts with Perl scripts. Well, that's not completely true — Bourne shell is certainly installed in some places that Perl isn't. But Perl really is awfully widespread.
| Perl | Python | Bourne | ksh88 | Bash | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| RHEL | 6 | v5.10.1 | v2.6.6 | |||
| 5 | v5.8.8 | v2.4.3 | ||||
| Solaris | 11 | v5.10.0 | v2.6.4 | |||
| 10 | v5.8.4 | v2.3 | ||||
| 9 | v5.6.1 | x | ||||
| 8 | v5.005_03 | x | ||||
| AIX | 6.1 | v5.8.2 | x | |||
| HP-UX | 11.31/IPF | v5.8.8 | x | |||
| OS X | 10.8 | v5.12.4 | v2.7 | |||
| 10.3 | v5.8.1 | v2.3 | ||||
| 10.2 | v5.6.0 | v2.2 | ||||