I think that you're mistaken—say (as opposed to print) provides it for me.

Oops, right

but then I would have had to point out that sort { $a <=> $b } 1..10 could be replaced by just 1..10,

That wouldn't demo how to sort 10 after 9 rather than before 2.

That wasn't my goal, largely because I'm not sure what you mean.

The OP suspected that hashes keys are always strings and that stringification of the keys was the cause of his problem.

Hash keys are always strings (except for magical hashes), but that's not the cause of his problem. Perl treats the number zero and the string zero identically (except for its bitwise operators).

(I'm sure you know that. It's for the OP's benefit.)