Is Perl *that* good?

[Michael]

>In theory, the web routine for phonetic searches might have been
>implemented in PHP. The trouble with that is that I would have to
>maintain both a PHP and a Perl version of the same routine. I find it
>much easier to just copy and paste the whole mess (at present about 120
>lines) between the encoding and the decoding routines in Perl, and run
>an exec("perl norphon.pl $name") from PHP.
>
I've wondered if there is really a reason why a single language 
processor couldn't be made that Perl, Python, PHP, etc could all be 
compiled into. Not necesarily a byte code system like Java but just a 
shared language processing core. Then the various languages could 
directly work with libraries written in the other languages. How much 
does the syntax actually effect the abilities of the language? How much 
should it effect the abilities of the language?