Damian Conway wrote: > Have I missed anything?
Perhaps you've missed one thing. It was kind of in a different branch of the thread, about string numerification yielding NaN when given input that is "bad" according to some definition of "badness". It was clear from discussion that various contributors weren't sure of exactly what types of numbers Perl 5 presently can auto-numerify from strings. The current selection in Perl 5 is fine for many uses, and would make a great default for Perl 6. But it would be nice if Perl 6 could provide a pragma to produce a warning on the first run-time auto-numerification (compile time would be really hard to do), together with a selection of different string numerification methods for extracting the numeric values, for a variety of types of numeric values. For example, one method might accept only integers, another method might allow complex numbers, another method might allow metric suffixes for scaling, another method might allow floating point numbers, another might allow decimal numbers without exponents, another might allow full numeric expression evaluation (numeric constants and operators only). One method should work exactly as default Perl 6 numerification, allowing the user to be explicit about it without getting the warning. With such an option, you could choose the type of conversion based on the type of data you expect. I could see each of those conversion functions taking an optional parameter defining what to return if the conversion fails... typical values for the parameter might be undef, 0, or NaN... and I'd recommend that omitting the parameter would cause the conversion to return undef.... easily detectable by code that cares, converts to zero for some cases of meaningful results (when they really might be) and compatible with most cases of not supplying a parameter to a method. NaN could be provided as the parameter only under use IEEE (or whatever). -- Glenn ===== Due to the current economic situation, the light at the end of the tunnel will be turned off until further notice.
