Well... the => operator forces any "word" (bareword, really) to be interpretted as a string. Now, the definition of what exactly makes a "word" may be slightly different from place to place, but arguably, something consisting purely of numeric characters is not a "word".

Of course, what might otherwise be thought of as a "word" in other contexts in perl would be something like: /^[a-zA-Z_]\w*$/... but the fact that a leading dash is an acceptible part of a "word" with respect to the => greater operator... who can really say? 

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In reply to Re: Use of the => operator by etcshadow
in thread Use of the => operator by roju

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