From: Jack Su <jackxxu@...>
Date: 2010-10-19T07:06:15+09:00
Subject: Re: data type for a string value

> The usual solution to this is to expect a number of types (possibly only
> one), parse them and deal with them as needed.  Even if there would be a
> magical mechanism which would determine arbitrary types you would still
> need code to process each type properly.

it would be nice to have a method String#parse.

'12/31/1999'.parse() => a date object
'$1.23'.parse() => a float object
'32.1%'.parse() => a float object


> What kind of problem are you really trying to solve?

for parsing data from spreadsheets (or csvs for that matter) to sort 
data based on their types, e.g. 21 > 3 not '21' < '3'.

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