Re: numeric captures (string.find)

[David Given <dg@...>]

Asko Kauppi wrote:
> No, it doesn't..
[...]
> Also, if the number is used as a key to table, there's no implicit 
> conversion. Such bugs are tedious and hard to find.

Hrm. Yes, you're right. That's annoying.

How horribly would it break things if you made <string> == <number> 
implicitely attempt to convert the string to a number? And what about 
changing strings so that hashing a string that contained a number 
produced the same value as hashing a number?

...although, thinking about it, this could well be a pretty ghastly 
idea, too.

The problem with changing string.find() to return real numbers is that 
it doesn't know when you expect to find a number or not. Which means 
that it will fail for all the reasons that the above two suggestions 
will fail.

local _, _, a, b = string.find("42.00000000000000000000000001 world",
	"([%d.]+)%s+(.+)")
print(a == 42)
--> ?

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