I wrote a lengthy reply to this but it got lost somewhere; in summary:

1) Although it may not appear so, I do indeed understand how Perl functions handle strings of chars; we seem to disagree about the importance of understanding internals, however.

2) My problem arises when getting data to/from a script, via various CPAN modules and data transformations. And here, there is really no getting away from the need to understand precisely what data transformations are taking place, and where.

Steve Collyer