Luke Palmer writes: > After this statement: > > $x = '345'; > > C<$x> is a number.
Oh. I'd been assuming that quote marks indicated strings, and that, while a string containing only digits could obviously be treated as a number (as in Perl 5), it wouldn't be one without being provoked. > I should hope it would be treated as one during multimethod dispatch. What about: $x = '0345'; Is that a number? And if so which of these is the same as? $x = 345; $x = 0345; What about if the variable contains a line read from user input? As a programmer I'd expect that to be a string -- and if a user happens to type only digits then it'd be surprising to find the variable is considered to be of a different type. User input comes with a trailing line-break character, which would make it not a number. But would it suddenly become a number after C<chomp>ing it? Or if the input stream was auto-chomping? Smylers
