I had to think very long and hard for a case where having strings be character arrays would offer syntatically superior, more concise ways of expressing than using substr. I have finally come up with something. Consider this:

my @string = "hubris" =~ /(.)/sg;
@string[0,2,5] = "etv" = ~ /(.)/sg;
print reverse @string;

__END__
virtue

[download]
This would be very awkward to achieve with substrs, particularly for more complex examples. (Bioinformatics might be an area where such could be useful.) But thanks to /(.)/sg expressiveness doesn't suffer much even here; the only concern I see is efficiency, if you do this a lot. But if that really is a probably, use a class with a real array in its guts and an overloaded stringification operator would probably suffice. And that one is downright trivial, something like: sub stringify { local $"; "@{$_[0]}" }

Assignment needs to be overloaded too, I guess, and would be slightly less trivial.

All in all, I conclude that there's not much need for such a feature at the language level. A module should suffice.

Makeshifts last the longest.

In reply to Re: Are strings lists of characters? by Aristotle
in thread Are strings lists of characters? by John M. Dlugosz

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