Hi All,
High in fun, but low in usefulness is -+- , a high precedence string
numerifier. It sort of looks like an A C Clarke style spacestation so
that's what I've been calling it. Although I'm not too sure that Larry's
spaceship <=> would be able to dock to easily.
Examples:
print -+-'23a' # prints 23
print -+-'3.00' # prints 3
print -+-'1.2e3' # prints 1200
I know 0+ does the trick too, but binary + has a relatively low
precedence. Perl will automatically numerify the arguments of the *
operator but won't do so for x, !~ or =~. Hence this operator is useful
for removing unsightly parenthesises from some expressions.
print 0+'20GBP' x 3; # Wrong. Prints 20 ==
0+"20GBP20GBP20GBP"
print (0+'20GBP') x 3; # Wrong. x 3 is applied to the return of
print
print((0+'20GBP') x 3); # Right, but too Lispy
print -+-'20GBP' x 3; # Right. Spacestation to the rescue!
Unfortunately -+- is bugged [*], but I'll leave these as gotcha's for
your production code. :-)
Cheers,
Alistair
[*] You might want to consider: print -+- '-2B' x 5; # Bug?
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