What machines support Perl? Where do I get it?

The standard release of Perl (the one maintained by the perl development team) is distributed only in source code form. You can find this at http://www.perl.com/CPAN/src/latest.tar.gz, which is a gzipped archive in POSIX format. This source builds with no porting whatsoever on most Unix systems (Perl's native environment), as well as Plan 9, VMS, QNX, OS/2, and the Amiga.

Although it's rumored that the (imminent) 5.004 release may build on Windows NT, this is yet to be proven. Binary distributions for 32-bit Microsoft systems and for Apple systems can be found http://www.perl.com/CPAN/ports/ directory. Because these are not part of the standard distribution, they may and in fact do differ from the base Perl port in a variety of ways. You'll have to check their respective release notes to see just what the differences are. These differences can be either positive (e.g. extensions for the features of the particular platform that are not supported in the source release of perl) or negative (e.g. might be based upon a less current source release of perl).

A useful FAQ for Win32 Perl users is: 

    http://www.endcontsw.com/people/evangelo/Perl_for_Win32_FAQ.html