I'd even go so far to recommend against doing 0 + '4568' because it's really pretty meaningless. A scalar is a scalar. If there's a number in there, use it like a number and it will act like a number. The only time we should have to resort to 0+ trickery is when there's some ambiguity (e.g. we want to treat "123abc" as "123" numerically, or "0E0" for similar reasons) or we need to do some black magic. Using it unnecessarily complicates code needlessly and makes it harder to read. I've actually seen code where the coder wrote something like: $i = "123"+0 because he didn't quite understand that the two data types were interchangeable in Perl. Scary!