The question came up elsewhere of what's the most CPU-time-effective way in Perl to determine whether a scalar's value "looks like a number". It led to the following thought:
In some languages, you can ask the question "Is this variable an INT?" and get a YES or NO answer.
There are others in which you can ask "Are you an INT?" and get the answer "No, I'm a pointer to CHAR."
And then there's Perl, which more or less answers, "Why, sure, honey, if that's your kink we can do that, no problem...."
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