It is precisely because of this flexibility that you need different comparison operators. Because a scalar could be interpreted as both a number and a strings, you need to tell perl which basis you want to compare.

Let's say you have $a="1" and $b="000001". Numerically they are the same, but for the purposes of your application those leading zeros could be very important. Because perl has no way of knowing how you want to compare those two variables, you need to tell it by using the appropriate comparison operator.

--ZZamboni

Well said. Although the language is typeless, it is critical that logical query expressions be type-specific. For example, it might be critical to tell if a string is, exactly, "1.0" (eg. for a version number). Of course, you can use /^1\.0$/ (I think that's right :) ) but that's an inefficient approach. For efficiency's sake, 'eq' is needed, and 'gt' and 'lt' have quite different meanings to > and <. In perl, "1.2" > "1a", but "1.2" lt "1a". If I remember correctly :)

For a typeless language...

• You can't store a hash into an array variable.
• You can't store an array into a scalar.
• You can't dereference a hashref as if it was a coderef.
• ... and so on.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

sorry to be a pedant, but i figure it's only fair since you tend to be one with respect to Perl (and many including me are grateful for it).

the word 'spake' is not a past participle, it is only a preterite verb form. it only appears as the head verb in a clause, like so: "Thus spake Fr. Harry G. Monk: Perl is typeless".

while i agree with you, that perl is a very typed language... the person is complaining not about the inability to compare things of different types... what died here is the comparison of a scalar against a scalar, the system died not because we were comparing different types! The system died because we were comparing the same type, with a different value... that, you have to admit, on some level... seems "bad"

ok, that's the word i was looking for... orthagonality... language fails the "test" of a good language (according to my programming language theory book) at this point ( the eq == discrepancy) perl is NOT orthagonal...

Though it often does the Right Thing even in ambiguous situations (is "001" supposed to be interpreted as a number or a string?), there are occasions when it needs explicit instructions. Things like eq and scalar and so forth let you be sure things are interpreted as you intend.