. . . bypasses a lot of the benefits of using a strongly-typed language

C is not a strongly-typed langauge. Its type system is only useful for hints to the compiler. There are too many ways to subvert it to be anything more. Further, its type errors are just as likely to be annoyances as they are real problems. Rather, C is statically typed, i.e. its types are determined at compile time. Static != strong.

Perl is more strongly typed than C is. Perl's scalars and lists are very seperate types, and are not so trivial to convert into each other. In fact, it doesn't make sense for there to be a generalized solution for doing list -> scalar.

Try OcaML. There's a real type system.