Dear string-to-integer parsers…
These are very useful functions that any language with distinct string and integer types will include in their standard library. Pass in a string with decimal digits and it’ll return the equivalent in the binary integer form that you can do mathematics with.
Note that by “rejected”, it could mean anything in practice as long as the response is distinct from returning a number. Maybe it throws an exception, maybe it returns null, maybe it also returns a Boolean to tell you if the string value was valid or not.
Point is, I’m thinking of parser functions that have two distinct kinds of result. A success result that includes the integer value, or a rejection result. No half-way results.
I will acknowledge that there are standard library functions that will keep going along the string gobbling digits, until it hits a non-digit and the response tells the caller what number it found and where that first non-digit is. Those are very useful for tokenizing loops as part of compilers, but my idea would break that interface too much. If that’s your variety of parser, sorry, but this post isn’t for you.
Also, I’m thinking of functions that parse as decimal. Maybe you have optional flags that allow you to specify what base to use, but it parses as decimal by default. I’m concerned only with the decimal mode of operation.
