The problem with this is that the numeric comparison could return false positives. Try doing a comparison of 'aa' == 'bb'. With -w on, this does issue warnings, however it will still return true.

That is why something like Fletcher's looks_like_number from Scalar::Util is needed.

I have not used it myself, so I can not attest to the accuracy of this function, however the code would be like this:

sub equals {
    my ($val1,$val2) = @_;
    return 1 if !defined $val1 && !defined $val2;
    if (looks_like_number($val1) && looks_like_number($val2)) {
        return $val1 == $val2;
    } else {
        return $val1 eq $val2;
    }
}
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