Not a Perl expert, although I've enjoyed using it.
I think it's less string-oriented than bash/shell. While it only has a couple of hard types ($scalar, @array, and maybe some pointers and stuff), I believe it has soft internal types like int/float/string that get handled seamlessly.
In shell, everything is a string until you force it to be used otherwise. Not sure, but I think TCL is very similar, yet is used for larger apps.