Somewhat off the subject, but I saw this and had to comment. This is a quote from PHP's string page.

Note: It is no problem for a string to become very large. There is no practical bound to the size of strings imposed by PHP, so there is no reason at all to worry about long strings.

"Don't worry about big strings. PHP will make sure you can use them." Uh-huh. Seems like File::Stream should be encoded in PHP, seeing as it was worried about infinite streams ... :-)