By contrast the warning you are comparing it to will catch any time when Perl has to use a string as a number and doesn't think that it looks like a number. It shows up for any numerical operator, not just <=>. This warning is far more useful because if it shows up, you almost certainly are doing something wrong. And the performance penalty is negligable because the operation that you have to do to test for the error is an operation that you are already doing (namely test the string to see if it has any reasonable way of being interpreted as a number).

If you still want to argue for it, use the perlbug utility to send your suggestion to the core Perl developers. Do not be dismayed if they reject it.

You should probably read up what qw is doing:

perl -MData::Dumper -e 'print Dumper([qw(1 2)]);';
$VAR1 = [
          '1',
          '2'
        ];
[download]

perl -MData::Dumper -e 'print Dumper([1,2]);';
$VAR1 = [
          1,
          2
        ];
[download]

You are in fact comparing strings :), but that doesn't matter.
As numbers are always completly valid as string-value and the internal conversion is almost always what you want, this is maybe one if the times where DWIM instead of DWIT is biting you in the privat parts...

regards,
tomte

Hlade's Law:

If you have a difficult task, give it to a lazy person --
they will find an easier way to do it.