And another point, which I came across while reading Learning Perl, is that Perl itself does not differentiate between binary and text files. I can read a binary file into a string and manipulate the string value, truncate it, etc. just as I can read a text file into a string.

The authors say that this feature of Perl is a result of Perl using a full byte (256 possible permutations of the 8 bits) to store each character of a string. ASCII characters only take up 7 bits apiece, so the ASCII character set is incapable of easily representing a binary file. It is hard to say why Larry chose to represent characters as 256 bits apiece, thus allowing strings to contain a binary file.

I suspect it had more to do with a need to represent Asian languages than it did with any desire to store binary files as strings.