use Perl

Docbook XSLT stylesheets are available as the docbook-xsl package in fink. FOP you have to download from apache.org but it's Java and it works fine on OS X.

I do a lot of docbook work and so have put together lots of wee makefiles to do this conversion for me.
See something like http://github.com/simoncozens/songbee/blob/master/manual/Makefile for one of them. If you can't get FOP working, then the latexpdf target will do it through latex.

...because, considering your example, Perl has a way of transforming stuff in a list:

@array = map { munge($_) } @array;

Nothing synthetic there.

Sure.

And even if you would, what would you be able to do?

Write large chunks of the Perl 6 core libraries.

In fact, it's bad enough that Dave Cross picked up a Simon Cozens' project

Yeah, that's when you know things are getting bad.