I am not very familiar with Perl. When you say different operators for strings and numbers are you referring to something similar to PHP's === operator for which "1"===true would be a false statement?

Perl's numeric equivalence operator is ==, while its string equality operator is eq. Perl's operators are monomorphic that way.

in perl

"==" returns true if the left argument is numerically equal to the right argument.

"eq" returns true if the left argument is stringwise equal to the right argument.

see 'perldoc perlop' under the heading "Equality Operators"