nitpick for the sake of fun, b/c of the magic of the string_to_number conversion using it as a number will portably work.

Sorry, no, it doesn't:

$ perlbrew exec perl -e '%h="a".."z";warn"$] ".keys%h," ".%h," ",0+%h,
+"\n"' >/dev/null
5.034000 13 13 13
5.032001 13 13 13
5.030003 13 13 13
5.028003 13 13 13
5.026003 13 13 13
5.024004 13 8/16 8
5.022004 13 10/16 10
5.020003 13 7/16 7
5.018004 13 11/16 11
5.016003 13 9/16 9
5.014004 13 9/16 9
5.012005 13 9/16 9
5.010001 13 9/16 9
5.010000 13 9/16 9
5.008009 13 9/16 9
5.008001 13 12/16 12
5.006002 13 4/8 4
[download]

Minor edits to shorten output.