From: Bruce Ingalls <bingalls@...>
Date: 2002-03-20T10:21:20+09:00
Subject: Re: Why no String#bin?

Paul Brannan wrote:
....
> Additionally, both String#oct and String#hex return 0 on error, which
> means I have no way to distinguish between an error condition and the
> number zero.
> 
> A preferable solution would be a Ruby interface to rb_str2inum.  This is
> still not optimal, because there is still (afaict) no way to detect bad
> data.  A Ruby interface to strtoul would work, but would not work with
> Bignums.

Cannot Ruby handle this with exceptions?
Why doesn't Ruby define NaN (Not a Number), as does ANSI C++?
I recall that C++ also has Undefined.