For further reading I recommend the following Perl man pages: perlembed, perlxs, perlguts and perlcall. Also, the book Advanced Perl Programming by Sriram Srinivasan and published by O'Reilly is another good resource.
The source code for this software as well as some examples can be found at http://www.doitnow.com/~quillan/john/sc_perl/.
I would like to thank my friend and coworker Mark Reibert for reviewing this article and giving me a few ideas before I sent it in.