Yeah, perlport has caused more wrong conclusions than enlightenment on newlines in my experience. For example:
In Perl, \n is a logical newline. It does not necessarily represent the single ASCII character
In Perl, "\n" is actually always exactly one character. On an ASCII system, it is also always ASCII linefeed... except for the single case of old Macs, which took the unprecedented route of being "almost ASCII".
"\n" is not much more a "logical" newline than "a" is a logical letter A. "a" is also always exactly one character and is also not always the ASCII lower-case letter A.