This is misleadingly incorrect. You assume that just because the perl compiler will read a plain 0x0005 as the numeric value 5 that the same thing in a scalar behaves the same way. In this case strings with leading numbers are evaluated in numeric context as the value of the leading number. In this case this means that $var = "0x0005"; $var == 5 is false - in fact, $var == 0 because $var begins with the string "0".

The correct answer is to use the hex() function. You'd have to resort to using eval to get your idea to work (which re-invokes the compiler which has its own rules...).

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