There are fundamental things in Perl, which might be confusing here

  1. a scalar variable can be a number or a string (or a reference ...)
  2. There are various literal notations in code
  3. literals like "txt" , 'txt' , q(txt) , ... will produce the same string txt
  4. literals like 016 , 0xE , 14 will produce the same number (well integer) 14
  5. a string might look like a literal notation of a number like "016" , but literal notation inside strings will not be interpreted
  6. an implicit string to number conversion will always be decimal, hence "016" + 3  == 19 not 17
  7. if you want another base, you need to convert the string explicitly by yourself
  8. one (dangerous) way is eval("016") == 14

I hope it's clearer now.

Cheers Rolf
(addicted to the 𐍀𐌴𐍂𐌻 Programming Language :)
Wikisyntax for the Monastery

In reply to Re^3: octal number mysteriously changes after pass to subroutine by LanX
in thread octal number mysteriously changes after pass to subroutine by Anonymous Monk

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