Re: Suggest to change gnus-sum.el -- deal with float number for

[Reiner Steib <reinersteib+gmane@imap.cc>]

On Thu, Oct 21 2004, Cheng Gao wrote:

> Say a NG has 5000 articles.
> When you press SPC on it, you are prompted to input articles to read.
>
> 1. If you input "10abcd", 10 articles will be displayed as does by
> (setq select (if (stringp select) (string-to-number select) select))
>
> 2. If you input "10.11", you get error message, and no articles
>    displayed.

GIGO (Garbage In Garbage Out).

> I think since case 1 is addressed in Gnus for error tolerance and
> user-friendliness, 

I don't thinks so.  It is most probably just because
`string-to-number' behaves like this.  Striping non-number characters
is not even documented (beside spaces and tabs):

,----[ C-h f string-to-number RET ]
| string-to-number is a built-in function in `C source code'.
| (string-to-number STRING &optional BASE)
| 
| Parse STRING as a decimal number and return the number.
| This parses both integers and floating point numbers.
| It ignores leading spaces and tabs.
| 
| If BASE, interpret STRING as a number in that base.  If BASE isn't
| present, base 10 is used.  BASE must be between 2 and 16 (inclusive).
| If the base used is not 10, floating point is not recognized.
`----

> why not going a little further?

It makes the code more difficult to read without any gain, IMHO.  _If_
anything should be changed, then Gnus should error out on "10abcd",
too.  (But I don't think this is necessary.)

Bye, Reiner.
-- 
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