Just to add fuel to the fire, I'll point out that the concept of "is numeric" is open to a wide variety of interpretation. See the following snippet direct from the Cookbook Recipe 2.1:

warn "has nondigits"        if     /\D/;
warn "not a natural number" unless /^\d+$/;             # rejects -3
warn "not an integer"       unless /^-?\d+$/;           # rejects +3
warn "not an integer"       unless /^[+-]?\d+$/;
warn "not a decimal number" unless /^-?\d+\.?\d*$/;     # rejects .2
warn "not a decimal number" unless /^-?(?:\d+(?:\.\d*)?|\.\d+)$/;
warn "not a C float"
       unless /^([+-]?)(?=\d|\.\d)\d*(\.\d*)?([Ee]([+-]?\d+))?$/;
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Peace,
-McD