I only learned about them when a state sent me files in EBCDIC [2]. As with all things perl, you can convert from that to ASCII as a one liner. Or, rather, i helped someone much smarter than me do that, 20 years ago.
Not to mention that you cannot test for uppercase or lowercase like the ASCII `ch >= 'A' && ch <= 'Z'` because they are not contiguous in EBCDIC. A good reason to use the C RTL.
These days I consider it more of a "what was I thinking" facepalm-worthy sort of thing but at the time I was very proud of it. The "what was I thinking" part is more about the fact that some poor bastard had to come along after me and support that mess.
Watch your sorting methods, too. I had a guy over here once totally confused why running his SAS job on the mainframe yielded a different result than the same code running on PC SAS against the same data.
No need to hesitate. It's not half bad for a dynamic language if you keep a little discipline. 20 years ago the average Perl programmer was probably akin to the average PHP programmer from 10 years ago. That is, not very experienced, and with code that made that fairly obvious, even if it got the job done. With some of the more modern modules, you get something pretty swizzy[1]. :)