The "qw" means quote word(s). This is aide to help in typing in lots of strings. That's all it does.

If you want to mix decimal,octal,hex numbers in some @a=qw(...),see below. Just ask Perl to evaluate what that string means in terms of an actual "number".

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use Data::Dumper;

my @array_of_strings = qw (10 20 0x47 1 30 0b011);
#
# "qw" is "quote word(s), this is the same as:
# my @array_of_strings = ("10","20","0x47","1","30","0b011");

print Dumper \@array_of_strings; # only string context not "numbers"

my @array = map{eval $_}@array_of_strings;
# or my @array = map{eval $_} qw (10 20 0x47 1 30 0b011);

print Dumper \@array;


__END__
prints:
$VAR1 = [
          '10',
          '20',
          '0x47',
          '1',
          '30',
          '0b011'
        ];
$VAR1 = [
          10,
          20,
          71,
          1,
          30,
          3
        ];
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Update: added a binary number to example.