...it really sounds like you should be using the builtin list traversal operators...

The code is not traversing a list. It is creating an iterator, and executing a block of code for each item returned by the iterator. You might argue that a foreach{...} is an iterator, but that would require generating the entire list first, which may not be appropriate here. In perl it would be more like:

my $nxt_str = make_strings($n);
while (my $str = $nxt_str->()) {
  #..do stuff with $str
}
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