As already noted, it's not actually done "character by character".

No, it was (correctly) said that skipping the leading non-number part isn't done at all.

If it were done that way 'nanosecond' == 'nanosecond' and 'informal' == 'formal' would both be true.

They are both true even though it's not done that way, so that's a useless statement.

They are both true

Where are they both true ?
Did you even bother testing it ?

Quite frankly, I regard it as an insult that you so quickly assume I'm just another moron.

On Windows, perl-5.14.0:

C:\>perl -e "print \"true\" if 'nanosecond'== 'nanosecond'"

C:\>perl -e "print \"true\" if 'nanosecond'!= 'nanosecond'"
true
C:\>perl -e "print \"true\" if 'informal'== 'formal'"

C:\>perl -e "print \"true\" if 'informal'!= 'formal'"
true
C:\>
[download]

Should be the same most places.

Rob

I get exactly the opposite results under 5.8.8 and 5.8.9, hpux, msys, and windows. One such example:

$ perl -e "print \"true\" if 'informal'== 'formal'"
true
[download]

Update: Under strawberry 5.14.2 MSWin32-x86-multi-thread, the results are different:

$ /c/perl/strawberry/perl/bin/perl -e "print \"true\" if 'informal'!= 
+'formal'"
true

$ /c/perl/strawberry/perl/bin/perl -e "print \"true\" if 'informal'== 
+'formal'"
[download]

Update: Ahhhh! Very sneaky :-).

<Reveal this spoiler or all in this thread>

--MidLifeXis

Yes, even though I knew the result, I did test. I even used 5.14.0 on Windows like you. (ActivePerl build 1400, to be specific.)

>perl -e "print \"true\" if 'nanosecond'== 'nanosecond'"
true
>perl -e "print \"true\" if 'nanosecond'!= 'nanosecond'"

>perl -e "print \"true\" if 'informal'== 'formal'"
true
>perl -e "print \"true\" if 'informal'!= 'formal'"

>
[download]

'nanosecond', 'informal' and 'formal' are all numerically equal to zero, so your build is very buggy.