Re: file:read("*n") reference manual entry improvement

[Roberto Ierusalimschy <roberto@...>]

> Good question. Of course I'm against adding too much clutter or an
> extensive explanation. After all the behavior is not directly related to
> Lua implementation, and the explanation cannot be clear anyway because
> of the murkiness of C standard about it.

I am more and more convinced that the real problem is that the
implementation has a bug. See the following two cases:

input	whas was read by '*n'	returned result
0x.G	0x.			0
0xG	0x			nil

In both cases it read the correct part (a prefix of a valid number),
and in both cases that string was not a valid number itself, but it
accepted one and rejected the other.

> However completely ignoring the issue is bad IMHO. A (good) one-liner at
> least *hinting* at the problem should be added for the benefit of
> newbies or casual users.

I will figure out something to add.

-- Roberto