On 17/08/10 02:49, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
bearophile wrote:
This post is about this enhancement request of mine that recently
David Simcha has closed as wontfix:
http://d.puremagic.com/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=4165
[snip]
Phobos functions are meant as the most simpler bricks, that you may
compose to perform more complex operations: this is generally true
and good, but Python shows that when two or few operations are
frequently done attached to each other, it's good to put inside the
std lib something the performs the composed thing in one go, because
it helps chunk the code and makes the code shorter and more readable,
and decreases the chance for bugs. When I read numbers from files I
will need to use to!int(txt.strip()) often.
I don't feel very strongly about this (in particular e.g. I do allow
leading whitespace for floating-point parsing).
My only problem is that sometimes people _don't_ want to ignore trailing
whitespace, which becomes quite difficult. But then I guess that's a
rare case.
Honestly: why should someone *want* the conversion to *fail* if there is
additional whitespace? I would agree if to!()() would do something
useful with the whitespace but as it is, the routine simply seems picky
for the sake of being picky.
str<->number conversions are inherently inexact since there are various
representations for a number. It is just the decision about how tolerant
the routine should be. In my experience it makes sense to make the
conversion as tolerant as possible as long as it remains predictable and
there is no danger of misinterpreting input.
