The worry is that they might get the wrong idea from it: I need to print out these lines, so I'll split things into an array and then use join when I print because I saw that code on PerlMonks so it must be right.</cargocult>

I actually think your above answer is better because it does directly answer the question. You could always supplement it with asides about "to get an array of the lines use split like ...", or "if you're going to do complex processing before printing the contents you might want to use \&process_and_print and move the actual work to sub process_and_print { ... }".

But that's just me.