Not an in-depth answer... nor a completely satisfactory answer to your explicit question about bugs, but no!

All your examples except the first involve mixed alphanumerics... which, when numified -- via automatic conversion -- are converted by discarding "(t)railing non-number stuff and leading whitespace" 1 (and use warnings will call that to your attention) while treating leading (after discarding whitespace) numerals as a number.

What's more, if $x = "LanX" (no numerals, as in your line 1, "DB<9>") numification will treat $x as 0, whether you add, subtract, multiply or perform any other arithmetic operation...

perl -e "$x="LanX"; print ($x * 3);"
0

[download]

I don't know enough about perlguts to be sure morgon's suppostion about atoi is correct, but it certainly sounds plausible. On the other hand, I can't see how a well-defined and well-documented behaviour is "hiding ugly bugs."

1   Learning Perl, 3rd Ed (paper), Schwartz & Phoenix, p26.

In reply to Re: Numification of strings by ww
in thread Numification of strings by LanX

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