Two comments. First, this would break some existing scripts, which use the numeric value of a comaprision (for example someone might enumerate the negative numbers in a list like this: sub num_negatives { my $n = 0; $n += $_ < 0 for @_; $n; }. Secondly, this might slow down perl as the C library does not have a string comparision function that finds the offset of the first difference, so perl would have to implement it alone.