tonumber on large values

[Alexander Gladysh <agladysh@...>]

Hi, list.

Here is a Lua pitfall I hadn't come across yet:

$ lua
Lua 5.1.4  Copyright (C) 1994-2008 Lua.org, PUC-Rio
> s="3ef1e50af"
> =tonumber(s, 16)
4294967295
> return ("0x"..s) + 0
16896643247

Same with LuaJIT 2. Haven't tried 5.2.

I understand that the reason here is that tonumber() uses strtoul().

But I would say that expected behaviour for tonumber() with base 16 is
to behave identically to the equivalent coersion, provided by the
language. Otherwise, what's the point of using it?

Alexander.