Unless you have actual type annotations/tags (eg xml, jsonld, graphql), everything IS a string. There's no assumptions otherwise.
https://yaml.org/spec/1.2/spec.html#id2805071
Of course, even though YAML 1.2 is a decade old, there are still many parsers that accept YAML 1.1.
YAML has actual type annotations (tags).
I've never seen typed yaml, this is wild.
negative: !!int -12
zero: !!int 0
positive: !!int 34
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSCloudFormation/latest/UserGui...
http://p3rl.org/guts#Magic-Variables
perl -MDevel::Peek=Dump -mTie::Scalar -e'
//g; Dump $_; tie $c => "Tie::StdScalar"; Dump $c; Dump \%ENV
' 2>&1 | grep MAGICPerl tied-variable magic just means there are (effectively) getter and setter properties attached to the variable. "Magic" is just the name that was chosen in the implementation, and it stuck.
It's used to implement variables with special, automatic meanings, like $$ for "current pid" and $! for "last error".
It's also used to implement variables with user-defined behaviours on access, which is quite handy for a lot of abstractions.
A lot of modern languages support both of these things, because they are useful, but it's not called magic in those languages, it's called something like "watchers", "proxies", "getters and setters" or "hooks".
No, the criticism of YAML-style "magic" is that it leads to entirely surprising behaviour from innocuous input. Perl magic is not that kind. If you're using a special variable, you already know why.
In fact in Perl, you can opt for longer, readable, lexicon over the terse single character variables; and that’s literally how modern Perl should be written.
Whereas the problems described with YAML is where it can automatically alter your data based on what the parser “thinks” the data should represent. Which is generally what people mean when they talk about “magic” in IT: systems that don’t honour your input and instead automatically convert it into something else. Perl doesn’t do this even in spite of it looking like executable line noise to many.
If you take a look at how string handling works in most programming languages there is a lot of "magic" going on there. Which isn't a bad thing necessarily, because most programmers don't want to deal with the intricates of strings unless they really have to. The key is that this magic doesn't get in your way and doesn't do too magical things nobody ever asked of it.