Front page | perl.perl5.porters |
Postings from March 2022
On 2022-03-11 3:34 p.m., Yuki Kimoto wrote: > Darren, Dan, Yves > > Thank you for telling me the difference between a variable and a value. > > I have another question. > > If the two "created_as_number" and "is_number" functions existed, what cases > would the two functions return the different results? I have no idea, because I am not advocating for any such functions. What I'm advocating for, loosely speaking, is THESE two functions: * is_canonically_a_number - This is true when someone wants to deterministically categorize some given Perl value into exactly 1 best container, either number or string or boolean or whatever, for example, to turn it into JSON that can round-trip losslessly. This is mutually exclusive with is_canonically_a_boolean or is_canonically_a_string etc, only one ever returns true for a given value. * can_be_used_as_number - This is true when someone wants to treat some Perl value as a number, say to add one to it, and wants to know if Perl will do that cleanly. This is not mutually exclusive with can_be_used_as_a_boolean or can_be_used_as_a_string, often the same values several of those will return true for. The latter is what typical Perl users care about, the former is what important niches like serializers care about. The created_as_number being discussed appears to provide the is_canonically_a_number concept, but I'm not sure about edge cases. These are all hypothetical anyway. -- Darren DuncanThread Previous | Thread Next