Re^4: The error says the value is uninitialized, but it works anyway

in reply to Re^3: The error says the value is uninitialized, but it works anyway
in thread The error says the value is uninitialized, but it works anyway

In the Dumper output in this example, the single-quotes around the nummbers (e.g., $VAR1 = '5601.57') indicate that Perl still sees these scalars as strings

Actually, one has to be very careful with statements like these - there is no reliable way to ask Perl for the difference between e.g. 1 and "1". Although Data::Dumper has some code that tries to peek under the hood, it's not perfect:

use Data::Dumper;
my $str = "1";
print Dumper($str);  # $VAR1 = '1';
my $n = $str + 1;
print Dumper($str);  # $VAR1 = 1;
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Update: Pointed the link above to a better node with more references.

In Section Seekers of Perl Wisdom