This was done as part of 1ca345ed. perlop now contains: Perl operators that return true or false generally return values that can be safely used as numbers. For example, the relational operators in this section and the equality operators in the next one return 1 for true and a special version of the defined empty string, "", which counts as a zero but is exempt from warnings about improper numeric conversions, just as "0 but true" is. -doy