What, you don't
like code like
$_=~/^([^0-9].*)$/;?

It's got some nice features. As I said, I wouldn't use it for anything complicated or big, or in fact anything that has to be maintained. The largest perl script I wrote was about 300KB (contained about 200KB of plain text) and auto-generated an entire EJB layer for me from a Sybase DB schema...

It was a nightmare!
Anyway, it's been proven that if you generated a random stream of characters, it's more likely to be a valid, compiling, syntax-correct Perl program than any other language. I'm not kidding here.
(By the way, for those interested, the code above tests the last line of data you played with and returns true if it had started with a digit. It also assigns that data to the variable $1. Obvious, innit?)