Re: another take on hackers and painters

[Piers Cawley <address@hidden>]

Michael Vanier <mvanier@cs.caltech.edu> writes:

>> Date: Thu, 22 May 2003 14:12:35 -0700
>> From: Paul Prescod <paul@prescod.net>
>> 
>> I think that the real problem reported by (ex-) Perl users is that Perl 
>> sometimes sees string values that do not have reasonable integer 
>> representations and rather than telling you that it just guesses that 
>> you meant for the value to be 0. Often that will mask error conditions 
>> (not just potential logic bugs, but errors that have been triggered). I 
>> have a hard time believing that this is the behaviour you want often 
>> enough for it to be the default. For the rare cases where you want 
>> "convert the number if it is a number otherwise give me 0" I'd rather 
>> say so explicitly. 0 is not necessarily the best fallback value anyhow.
>> 
>
> It seems to me that the Right Thing, given that you want string->number
> autoconversion, is to try to do the conversion and raise an exception if
> the string cannot be reasonably converted to a number.  Why doesn't perl do
> that?  

  use warnings FATAL => 'numeric';

There you go, job done for the current lexical scope. 

-- 
Piers