Re: How to make bi-modal variables like $! ?

[bart]

Some things must have changed over the last few years... but now we have Scalar::Util, which includes the function dualvar:

dualvar NUM, STRING

Returns a scalar that has the value NUM in a numeric context and the value STRING in a string context.

 $foo = dualvar 10, "Hello";
 $num = $foo + 2;                    # 12
 $str = $foo . " world";             # Hello world