nix vs frame or winders
perl acts on information presented in a variety of ways, there is no single correct way of doing things but a ton of wrong ways to do it. Having spent the best part of last week under the hood of perl I found:
Unix has a variety of ways to handle a string, as a number, date(pick a date type), alpha numeric, hex, decimal, ascii etc.

Windows and other systems arbitrarily assign what it thinks the data set should be representative of.

Perl is like nix, you must clearly decide ahead of time what a data set represents then manipulate using those rules.

Since Im not a perl programmer by no means, feel free to disregard or correct.
regards,
daemon