As long as you don't want to keep any leading zeros.

The claim is less accurate than even that:

 % say "010 => 11"
8
11
[download]

Also:

  % say "123456789012345678901234567890 => 30"
1.23456789012346e+029
30
  % say "'123456789012345678901234567890' => 30"
123456789012345678901234567890
30
[download]

But I've also long considered the failure of "use strict; Foo::Bar =>" to likely just be an oversight. I suspect a patch to Perl's tokenizer/parser to allow '::' in so-called barewords would not be terribly difficult and might even be accepted by p5p.