I was shooting for a "base perl" solution, or I would also have reached for List::MoreUtils. You're right, it's a very useful module (and I'm not saying that just because the author sits 10 meters away from me :) ).

It'd be interesting to benchmark the match vs. index operations. I suspect that benchmarking the match case might actually lead to a useful use of "study"... (Edit: it doesn't: Benchmarking "Are all these characters in this sentence?")