Perl is a fully functional programming language, offering the ability to do anything you might want to write a program to do, as long as it is computationaly possible. That being said, Perl does have some limitations on what you might want to do with a Perl Program. For many mathematical computations, Perl will be much slower, and even less accurate/precise, than a program written in C, or using programs like SAS, Matlab, R, etc. For very complex operations over large datasets, a C program will usually work faster than a Perl program, and be more memory efficient, although it is much harder to write a C program which will run on any Operating System than it is to write pure Perl to run on any Operating System.