No, since Perl is not a strongly typed language! :)

What you have to do, though, is first convert the character 'a' into its ASCII value, using the ord() function. Then you can add your integer to the resulting value, and to obtain the character again, you use the chr function.

Here's a sample:

$first = ord("a");
for (my $x=0; $x < 10; $x++)
{
   print chr($first+$x). " ";
}
[download]

That will print :
a b c d e f g h i j

Hope it helps...