Also, your second test does not work for me ... When I run it, I get the following:

But that’s exactly what you should get! local $/ = \1; makes the diamond operator read one character at a time. The first character is 1, which is printed. The second character is a newline, which is also printed (I put the angle brackets in to show that a new line has been printed). The third character is 0, and because the C-style for-loop is not magic, this is “false” and the loop terminates without printing anything more.

Hope that helps,