UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users

Unfortunately I don't see this as an implied question, because Perl is very different from C, although Perl is itself written in C, and that's all it is to it.

This is not needed in most scenarios. Perl has regular expressions, so we do not need to compare byte by byte to search for something. Also, Perl supposedly acts on units of "characters", not "bytes". If you take multibyte characters such as UTF-8 into account (which Perl supports), a character may yield more than 1 byte, so individual bytes as a unit no longer makes any sense. So, for known strings, creating an array of bytes is IMO an evil, and being one of the reasons why many Perl programs are not multibyte safe. Of course, for a binary scalar, the situation is different.

Why set up a loop to do it? A one-liner will do:

@bytes = map { ord } split(//, $string);

but I really doubt how useful such an array is to me.

But Perl is not C. Perl people rarely, if ever, does anything like that, at least in common scenarios. I have been writing Perl for nearly 7 years and I have not yet encountered a single scenario that strictly necessitates ord() or anything like that.

Learning a language, you cannot quite expect to translate your past habit with other languages and expect it is still applicable. That's probably I have personally reviewed some other's code in the past that Java looks more like C, Perl looks more like sh/sed or BASIC, or highly sloppy PHP with mixed HTML, Javascript and other monsters. If using numeric comparison is wrong for strings in Perl, then it is wrong. This is language design, and it is not quite science so there is not quite an explanation for it. So one cannot rationalize an anomaly by masking it as something else and pretend as though it is working.