I fear these replies, it's like someone got the wrong impression about perl poetry. Yuckfoos poem seems most correct to me, perl knows what a number looks like, so no quotes necessary, but it shouldn't take much experimentation if you use the wrong kind of quotes for strings, as escape characters like \n and interpolated variables won't work if you use ' instead of " so if the output has the wrong things in, change it, and before long it'll become second nature.

the hatter