Bitwise operators are the only place where there's a difference between strings and numbers.
No. It matters for post-increment as well.
I think you're wrong there. Postincrement only works different for strings
if they start with a letter. For strings like "199" it makes no difference: you just get 200. And other strings apparently are converted to a number first, as
$x = "2A"; $x++ produces 3.
It's a deliberate decision, and well worth the offset. It allows you to use bitfields that aren't restricted to 32 (or 64) bits.
Yes, I don't question the functionality, that is useful. But the typical Perl thing to do would have been to provide
different operators for strings and for numbers. Just as with
= vs
eq and
+ vs
..
