I won't go into too much detail about why I am doing what I am doing, because I'm sure you've all got better things to do :).

I am tryin to write a piece of code that will take two values, add them together and print them out. Ah, simple you might think. But, I want to take my input as raw unsigned binary and perform the arithmetic on it. The problem that I am having is that perl is being too clever!

Say for example I enter 2 parameters as '1' and '2' (ascii codes 0x31 and 0x32 hex) and put them into two scalars. I add the scalars together `$a + $b`. I want the result of the sum of the two scalars to be returned as 0x61 hex, *not* '3'.

In summary, I want to prevent any interperation of data within scalars and to preserve raw binary input.

I also would very much like it if I could prevent a scalar from exceeding the value of 0xF, thereby ensuring that it behaves as a single byte all of the time; and throws an exception when trying to place a value that is too large into the it.

Many thanks. If I haven't defined the problem clearly enough then please say so, I am grateful for any help.

In reply to How to prevent perl from being clever by SamPointer

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