If you want the string as an array, you can do it natively in Ruby and many other languages, and you can do it in Perl by creating a class whose objects are anonymous arrays, then using overload to provide the obvious stringify operation.

However Ruby has a nice idea that I wouldn't mind seeing in Perl. In Ruby any class can get a looping operation if you define an "each" iterator, and include Enumerable. Well they defined an "each" iterator for strings. There is in Ruby no difference over a file which contains many lines, and looping over a string that contains many lines in it.

How is that for DWIM?