I think you should investigate why the substr built-in
is named "substr" and not "substring", "subStr",
"subString", "sub_str", "sub_string" or any of
a large number of other possibilities.
Alas, even the shortest of these (substr)
is way too long to be
competitive at code golf.
As a golfer, I wish Perl had used a built-in
operator rather than the substr
function
for string slicing.
This is one of the very few areas where Python
trounces Perl at code golf, as discussed in detail
at
Re: Drunk on golf: 99 Bottles of Beer.
Quite apart from golf, I miss Python's concise and
powerful string slicing operator when coding
in Perl and feel string slicing is a common enough
operation to warrant a very short "Huffman-coded"
way to do it --
especially given "things that are commonly used should be
shorter/more succinct" is one of Larry's
language design principles.
I also find it odd that Perl supports built-in
array and hash slices, but not built-in string slices.