You don't, because doing so would violate the guarantee that you cannot buffer overflow in Perl. But, there are good reasons why C gives you the rope to buffer overflow.

Let's say you want to iterate through the characters of a string and do something with each character. In C, that's pretty simple. Strings are just arrays of characters and arrays are just fancy pointers.

char string[] = "Hello";
char *ptr;
fr ( ptr = string; *ptr; ptr++ ) {
    do_something_with( *ptr ); // This is a single char
}
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Now, let's say you want to do the same thing in Perl. There's a few ways, but none are anywhere as efficient.

foreach my $char ( split //, $string ) { ... }
while ( $string =~ /(.)/g ) { my $char = $1; ... }
for ( my $i = 0; $i <= length $string; $i++ ) { my $char = substr( $st
+ring, $index, 1 ); ... }
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