Perl implementations of the list2str functions at http://www.python.org/doc/essays/list2str.html.

list2str.pl

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

use Benchmark qw( timethese cmpthese );
use List::Util qw( reduce );

my $list = rand_chars( 256 );

cmpthese( shift || 1, {
    f1  => sub { f1( $list ) },
    f2  => sub { f2( $list ) },
    f3  => sub { f3( $list ) },
    f6  => sub { f6( $list ) },
    f7  => sub { f7( $list ) },
} );

sub f1 {
    my( $list ) = @_;
    my $str = '';
    for my $item ( @$list ) {
        $str .= chr( $item );
    }
    return $str;
}

sub f2 {
    my( $list ) = @_;
    return reduce { $a . chr( $b ) } '', @$list;
}

sub f3 {
    my( $list ) = @_;
    my $str = '';
    for my $char ( map { chr } @$list ) {
        $str .= $char;
    }
    return $str;
}

sub f6 {
    my( $list ) = @_;
    return join '', map { chr } @$list;
}

sub f7 {
    my( $list ) = @_;
    return pack 'C*', @$list;
}

sub rand_chars {
    my( $length ) = @_;
    my $digits = 'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwzyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWZYZ0123456789';
    my $total = length $digits;
    my @out;
    for ( 1 .. $length ) {
        push @out, ord substr $digits, int( rand $total ), 1;
    }
    return \@out;
}