This reply is not an answer to your question, but instead another question. One of the first things that struck out and hit me from reading the Cookbook was the recipe for treating a string like an array of characters. Code was given, but with the caveat "don't do that." Why? Because you don't need to in Perl. I am curious to see some arguments that insist we need to treat strings as arrays in Perl. Are regexes that daunting?

jeffa

L-LL-L--L-LL-L--L-LL-L--
-R--R-RR-R--R-RR-R--R-RR
B--B--B--B--B--B--B--B--
H---H---H---H---H---H---
(the triplet paradiddle with high-hat)