title: Number and string concatenation in Perl
body: <p>I am new to Perl. I want to concatenate a string and a number with the <code>.</code> operator and the first argument will be a number. I can use join, sprintf and simply print them as print number,string. But I tried it with the <code>.</code> operator and got the following:</p>
  
  <pre><code>$foo = "hello".34 # Gives hello.34
  $foo = 34."hello" # Gives an error
  $foo = 34.34 # Gives 34.34
  $foo = 34.34.34 # Gives """
  $foo = "hello".34."hello" # Gives an error
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I tried them under Perl debugger.</p>
  
  <p>Why doesn't Perl concatenate a number and string with number as first argument while vice versa works fine? Why does 34.34.34 give """ in Perl?</p>