On Tue, Mar 15, 2005 at 10:34:04AM -0500, Aaron Sherman wrote:
> On Tue, 2005-03-15 at 10:09, Autrijus Tang wrote:
> > Currently Pugs numifies hexadecimal and octal strings as if they
> > are literals; that means "0x123" and "0o456" all work as expected.
> > Is that an acceptable treatment? What about "Inf" and "NaN" in
> > numeric context?
>
> This has long been a point of contention in Perl 5.
>
> There are two camps when it comes to how to interpret strings as
> numbers:
>
> 1. You must treat them the same for consistency.
> 2. You must not treat them the same because someone reading in
> lines of a report like the following could be seriously shocked
> by the behavior:
> $ Book
> 5foundation
> 8rama
> 0xanth
They may also be shocked if their data happens to have a line like the
following:
3e2-home
That particular configuration is also rarer and therefore more likely
to surprise if the programmer isn't aware.
I think that perl should auto-numify but not recognize hex, octal, or
even scientific notation without some explicit conversion.
-Scott
--
Jonathan Scott Duff
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
