After some thought, I came up with this not recursive but iterative version, which seems to work... It uses the m//gc and \G regex functionality to walk through the source string... I like this solution, and it should be easily adjusted to use any delimeter...

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

($\,$,)=("\n","\t");

use Data::Dumper;

my $string =
    '({ 1, 2, "three", 0, ({ "internal", "array", 0, }) "end", })';
my @array = parse($string);

print Dumper \@array;

sub parse {
    my $source = shift;
    my @result = ();
    my @stack = (\@result);
    {
        if($source=~/\G[\s,]*/gc)        # skip whitespace
            { redo; }                        
        if($source=~/\G\(\{/gc)          # start of a new part
            { push @stack,[]; redo; }  
        my $part;
        if($source=~/\G\}\)/gc)          # this part is done 
            { $part = pop @stack; }                 
        elsif ($source=~/\G"(.*?)"/gc)   # quoted string
            { $part = $1 }                          
        elsif ($source=~/\G(\d+)/gc)     # unquoted decimal
            { $part=$1; }
        elsif (pos($source)==length($source))  # done
            { last; }
        else {                           # something alien
            die "I don't get it at '".
                substr($source,pos($source))."'" 
        }
        my $target = $stack[$#stack];    # where to add part
        push @{$target},$part;           # add it!
        redo;
    }
    return @result;
}
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Update: JamesNC is da man... And I have thick fingers