I really like programming languages that allow you to think less without compromising the quality of your coding practices. Take for instance the new smart match operator '~~' which was introduced in the latest Perl releases.

if ( '123.0' ~~ 123 ) { ... } # String and number: TRUE

You don't have to keep trying to remember if a given scalar is a string or a number or 'numish' (both), sometimes wrongly using the standard operators ( eq, ne, lt, ==, >= ) in the wrong places causing bugs which are hard to track down.

Don't forget to enable this functionality by including the following in your code:

use 5.010;

Or you can enable the feature by calling Perl with the '-E' option at the command line.