A Perl scalar will pretend to be a number or a string as the circumstances require, so you do not need a "string to/from number" function.

You do if you want a non-base-2/8/10/16 string representation.

Actually, <c>POSIX::strtol<c> does not "parse a string representation of a number in any base into a number" but does a "String to (long) integer translation", which is quite different, but in Perl --IMO-- seldom useful.

In principle, yes, but if you know it will work with the range of numbers you have, strtol is possibly fine.