I strongly agree with Perl's current notion that a string is an individual thing (i.e. a scalar). I don't often have the need to break that thing apart and operate on its individual characters.
I think most Perl programmers would disagree with that notion. Especially since Perl is one of the few languages which has elevated fold/spindle/mutilate of strings into a language construct. Of course I'm talking about Perl's pattern matching facility (A.K.A. regex, but they're really not regular in the theoretical sense).