[colomon]

I should have also said that a great deal of thought went into making the default behaviors for "cmp" robust. But if (as in the article's example) you're producing numbers in the transformation code, "cmp" is guaranteed to do the right thing for you. Likewise if you produce strings in the transformation.

[adrianmsmith]

"Likewise if you produce strings in the transformation" What if you produce strings that look like numbers? Where, for example, extra leading zeros differ in significance between string and numeric comparison? Surely trying to use heuristics for this stuff is always a recipe for disaster, as with the == operator in PHP?

[colomon]

Perl 6 has proper types. If you produce a string, you are producing a Str object (well, technically it could be an object that does the Stringy role, but I don't think there are any other Stringy types implemented yet) and it will compare as a string, not a number, no matter what it looks like.

Likewise, if you produce a number, you have an object which does the Numeric role, and it will compare as a number.

[perlgeek]

If you produce strings, they are compared as strings, even if they look like numbers.