in reply to == and != don't work as expected

Perl is a weakly typed language. Unlike C, for isntance, if you wanted to create a number then a string you could do: 
my $string = 1;
$string = "code";  # we can reuse the variable name

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versus: 
char* mystring = "this is a C style string";
int   myInt    = 1; // Can't reuse variable names
                    // plus need to declare the type

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You will find this paradigm called DWIM (Do What I Mean) by a lot of people. Basically, part of the price we pay for DWIM is that the interpreter doesn't choke and die on ambiguities, but makes a best guess.

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Re^2: == and != don't work as expected
by chromatic (Archbishop) on Aug 09, 2004 at 17:23 UTC
    Perl is a weakly typed language.
    <mini_rant>

    No, it's not. It just doesn't associate the type with the name, as you might expect. Try coercing a hash to an array in place or treating a scalar as an array, for example.

    C's typing system is only slightly more advanced than bare assembly code.

    </mini_rant>
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      Out of curiousity, can you name some weakly typed languages with your definition?
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        Assembly, C, C++ (where it copies C), and Java all have weak type systems, according to this definition.

        Don't mistake a static system which requires knowing type information at compile time with a strong system which, when it has any meaning at all, usually means that you can't (or don't need to) subvert the type system.

        If you have to cast to do your work, you have a weak type system.

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In Section Seekers of Perl Wisdom