Perl is worse! (was: Python is Wierd!)

[Erik Max Francis]

Gregory Lielens wrote:

> Checking your other posts, it seems to me that the reasopn you are
> able
> to think about data (in particular numerical data) without caring
> about
> its type is that you always link the data to a text representation
> mentally...
> 
> And from your example, it is quite clear that Perl (I never used it,
> so
> I guess here...) also make this link quite strongly...still
> guessing...maybe because now or in a previous implementation, numbers
> are/were actually stored as string internally?

In Perl there is no strong notion of type, internal to objects. 
However, there _is_ a notion, because otherwise it would be hard to get
work done.  For instance, the ==, <, >, etc. relational operators treat
their arguments as numbers.  If you want to treat them as strings, you
use different operators (eq, lt, gt, etc.).

Perl doesn't make a distinction between types at the object level, but
it has to at the _operator_ level.

-- 
 Erik Max Francis / max at alcyone.com / http://www.alcyone.com/max/
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