I actually like the fact that it has different operators for numbers and strings. It somehow feels cleaner to me, this separation of contexts (contexts in the usual sense of the word, not strictly Perl contexts).<p>The fact that the string equivalents are all words (cmp, eq, ne, etc.) gives a useful mnemonic (strings usually contain 'words', so their operators are words), and also prevents ugliness from operator-proliferation - it's the symbol operators that usually make the code _look_ ugly and lead to claims of 'line noise'.