I'd say his code is an adequate solution. It works, doesn't it? And there's an advantage to maintainability by writing "longhand" instead of in as few characters of code as you can.
The motto of Perl is "There's More Than One Way To Do It." Perl doesn't really get on your case about coding style, as some languages do (I like Python too, but you've got to admit that people can get kind of snobbish when evaluating whether code is "pythonic" or not).
