http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=836531


in reply to Re^6: A wholly inadequate reply to an Anonymous Monk
in thread A wholly inadequate reply to an Anonymous Monk

And as for the type-based multi-dispatch case, we can observe below that Perl 5 does have the notion of runtime types: 

A:~ au$ perl -MDevel::Peek -e 'Dump 3'
SV = IV(0x100827190) at 0x100827198
  REFCNT = 1
  FLAGS = (IOK,READONLY,pIOK)
  IV = 3
A:~ au$ perl -MDevel::Peek -e 'Dump "3"'
SV = PV(0x100801258) at 0x1008271b0
  REFCNT = 1
  FLAGS = (POK,READONLY,pPOK)
  PV = 0x100207f60 "3"\0
  CUR = 1
  LEN = 16

[download]

Note that the IV above refers to an integer type, and PV refers a stringish type. (cf. perlguts for details...)

As for the casting functions, Perl 5 has them built-in: 

"".$x   # to string
0+$x    # to number
int($x) # to integer

[download]

Hope that helps! :-)

In Section Meditations