On Thu, Nov 14, 2002 at 10:28:38AM -0800, Michael Lazzaro wrote:
> 01_._23 # wrong?
this one has to be wrong by Larry's decree that _ is only valid
between "digits" (hexits?)
> 1.23_e_4 # ok?
Hrm. This one is annoying, but I think it should be okay.
> 20:1.G.K # base 20 (identical?)
> 20:1_G_K # base 20 (identical?)
> 20:1.16.19 # base 20 (identical?)
> 20:1_16_19 # base 20 (identical?)
If we used _ to separate digits in the explicit radix format then that
would free up . to be used for floating point numbers (I still don't see
a use for non-decimal floating point representations, but that's
probably just my lack of imagination). It sort of makes sense too in
that _ can only appear between digits in regular decimal format.
> Of course, a key issue is that, in perl5, the treatment of numeric
> literals is not at all the same as the treatment of stringified
> numerics. For example:
>
> 0x00ff # hex value ff
> '0x00ff' # integer value 0, with trailing 'x00ff'
>
> I think ways to solve this should be open to discussion. Hopefully
> Luke can give us some proposals, since he's writing that part.
Would that there were a way to "literalize" strings. Maybe we should
just have a function called that:
$string = <FH>; # say it reads 0xff
$num = literalize($string) # $num now = 255
-Scott
--
Jonathan Scott Duff
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
