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Comment by Estragon | Hacker News Reader

Yes, I think the biggest issue with perl was the devil-may-care culture around it. That was far from the only issue, though. It had (has?) some gratuitous features which are bound to cause hard to find bugs, like implicit conversion of numeric strings to numbers in certain contexts. That particular feature was the reason I chose to learn python in the mid 90s, rather than perl.

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> implicit conversion of numeric strings to numbers in certain contexts.

In Perl 6 at least, and to a large degree Perl 5 too, context only "causes" bugs if coders make assumptions that are invalid in Perl.

For example:

  say $foo + $bar

adds two numbers. So the context for $foo and $bar is numeric. So Perl coerces them to be numbers. If you didn't mean to add two numbers, don't use a numeric operation such as `+`.

If you want Perl 6 to make sure $foo and $bar are numbers already, then add a type to their declaration:

  my Int ($foo, $bar);

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