While Perl provides an obvious answer for many problems (such as implementing sequences as arrays as you mention), I think that you're right in saying that usage of these idiomatic expressions is highly dependent on their knowledge of the Perl language.
If there's one thing that I learned from teaching a college class in Perl, it's that some people learning Perl can come up with some amazingly creative (and often horridly inefficient) solutions to problems that have already been solved in some animal-themed book. For example, I had one kid who just loved storing sequences of single characters in an array. Something about it just sat right with him. Sometimes it's gotten to the point where I can recognize cheating on a project based on the bizarre idioms that are suddenly transferred from one person to another.