Note that perl-5.8 and better has built-in support for "in memory" files, which are set up by passing a reference instead of a filename to the open() call. The reason for using this module is that it makes the code backwards compatible with older versions of Perl.
The IO::String module provides an interface compatible with IO::File as distributed with IO-1.20, but the following methods are not available: new_from_fd, fdopen, format_write, format_page_number, format_lines_per_page, format_lines_left, format_name, format_top_name.