in reply to converting strings to ints

Yes, Perl took care of silently translating the empty string into a zero and use warnings alerted you to it.

Best of both worlds, if you ask me.

CountZero

A program should be light and agile, its subroutines connected like a string of pearls. The spirit and intent of the program should be retained throughout. There should be neither too little or too much, neither needless loops nor useless variables, neither lack of structure nor overwhelming rigidity." - The Tao of Programming, 4.1 - Geoffrey James