Actually, it's not "strange logic," after all "numbers" and "characters" are just human-readable strings representing the underlying bit representations; every time you type $x = 1234;, the tokenizer converts it to the underlying binary representation. The tokenizer also converts $y&nbps;= '1234'; to a binary form. oct and hex merely make the string to number conversion explicit, in the same way you would use sprintf|sscanf in C or ENCODE|DECODE in old (pre-Fortran 77) dialects of Fortran (now, you would use write|read). Perl automatically "stringifies" and "numerifies" based on context; print needs strings as inputs, so Perl automatically converts numbers to strings. sin needs a numerical argument, so Perl will convert a string to its numerical representation.