But if definition of numeric was expanded to include more ambiguous num formats, then perl would need a new warning: treating "0x41" as numeric , might be wrong thing to do, silence with "no warnings q/extranumeric/;"

That's a (the first) plausible approach to the proposition. It is certainly doable; but at what benefit and what cost?

Ignoring for now the old saw of backward compatibility. (Though it certainly wouldn't be ignored by the only persons whom opinions matter in this regard, namely the denizens of p5p.)

The "benefit" would be that the programmer expecting non-decimal numbers in string input could write:

print "%d\n", $string;
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Rather than:

printf "%d\n", hex( $string );
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And the cost would be implicitly calling hex every time a scalar currently holding a PV, is used in a numeric context.

That doesn't seem such a bad thing. (At least if it had been that way since the beginning: Ba-w-d co-pa-bil-ty!)

But, either this is going to warn "might be wrong thing" every time it finds an extranumeric and the programmers who don't want that will have to disable it; or it will be silent and the programmers that do want the warning, will have to explicitly enable it.

Seems to me that for those few that do, something like this is just as easy:

sub myHex {
    no warnings 'digit';
    hex( $_[0] };
}

printf "%d\n", myHex( $string );
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