Perl has built-in support for these characters, sort-of, for use when reading in text files. Several of Perl's operators pay attention to certain global variables, like $INPUT_RECORD_SEPARATOR.
while (my $item = <>) {
...
}
By default this will read lines from STDIN, but if you set $INPUT_RECORD_SEPARATOR to the RS character, it'll read a whole record at a time. You can also set $LIST_SEPARATOR to the FS character, which you can use with the split function to divide your record into fields, and the join function will use it automatically to turn your list of fields back into a record.
I used these characters and Perl features in the early 2000s for managing a data processing workflow. The data was well-suited to being processed as a stream of text, and by using these separator characters I was able to avoid the overhead of quoting and escaping which made the processing MUCH more efficient.
There's also the $IFS (Internal Field Separator) for Bourne-like shells.
Oh, and Ruby copied Perl's `$/` and `$,` for record and field separators. (The "English" module provides $INPUT_RECORD_SEPARATOR and $FIELD_SEPARATOR.)
I used these characters and Perl features in the early 2000s for managing a data processing workflow. The data was well-suited to being processed as a stream of text, and by using these separator characters I was able to avoid the overhead of quoting and escaping which made the processing MUCH more efficient.