I've never needed to use chop(), so I not really fussed about its disappearance or not, but this does give me the opportunity to mention my great wish for Perl6.

Please let me treat my strings as arrays of char!

Yes, I know I could probably write a module, Maybe use Overload; (can it handle operators that are paired []?) or just split to an array and then join (or unpack & pack; or substr as Rvalue and Lvalue) etc., but it would be so useful sometimes to be able to say $string[n]... which, with Perl6's new treatment of sigil's would no longer be ambiguous.

Then chop (getting smoothly back on topic:) simply becomes $#string-- or whatever $# will be in the new money.