I certainly wouldn't rule it out: I can imagine there are times you'd want to peek at the internal encoding of a string. However the only reason I can think of off the top of my head is to investigate a problem that you think may be a bug in perl, and there are other hammers I'd usually grab first in such cases (such as Devel::Peek, perl -Dxxx and the hammer-of-hammers gdb).

Hugo