I was surprised that this worked, but it did:

my @array = (32, "something","something01","01something");
print scalar @array."\n"; #prints 4
print +(@array)[0], "\n"; #prints 32
print +(@array)[1], "\n"; #prints something
print +(@array)[2], "\n"; #prints something01
print +(@array)[3], "\n"; #prints 01something
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An issue that I see is how Perl handles math on strings and potential confusion resulting from that:

my $test = '01xxx';
$test += 1;
print "01xxx + 1 is: $test\n"; #prints 2
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I do most of my work on Windows now and printing to the console in any form is such an incredibly "expensive" execution wise operation that I prefer the print "".function; option. The string concatenation is meaningless in the overall scheme of things.