At or about 09:22 AM 07/04/2002 -0700, jamesd@echeque.com replied thusly:
If they can't even ban crypto, you think they'll be able to ban Perl?
They cannot ban crypto without first banning Perl. That was the point of the Crypto-on-a-T-Shirt movement. Obvious solution. First ban Perl, then ban crypto ten years later. After all, why would anyone want to use Perl unless they are running a web site? If just anyone is allowed to run a web site, they can do all kinds of scams and push all kinds of lies. Besides which hacking will make the cow's milk dry up.
The point was more that the programs were trivial and short, and Perl was used because it's good for writing short unreadable programs. There were also LISP implementations in about four lines, though I don't think anybody got them down to three or two - but they were much more readable, being basically straightforward mathematical notations wrapped in lots of parentheses. However, good crypto and compact Perl both have the advantage that it's hard to distinguish them from line noise, and thus it's hard to detect either one....