Do you mean totally abstract out the concept of a file handle, and only handle files as "big strings" (as was suggested on the perl6 language list recently), or do you mean just implementing a file-handle as a scalar? You can do that already since perl 5.6: 
open my $fh,"< file";
while (<$fh>) {
  # stuff
}
close $fh;

[download]
I agree that this should have been the default from the start, but the file-handle type is probably an artifact of staying compatible with perl 4 (which had no objects).

update: here's the discussion on perl6-language

"What should it profit a man, if he should win a flame war, yet lose his cool?"

In reply to Re^2: Paul Graham on Great Hackers by Joost
in thread Paul Graham on Great Hackers by biosysadmin

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