You are right, "elf" is a stretch, it does not make sense to parse it as a number. But in some languages, the string "15 240,5" is just how a number is written (yes, that's a U+2009 THIN SPACE, you can't stop me from using it as a thousand separator in German). Obviously, despite having a , on their numpads, German programmers still expect computers to parse numbers with decimal dots and interpret commas as list values.

[–] bitfucker 4 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

Alright, maybe you misunderstood the term digits with numbers. When parsing a digit, you do not attach semantic yet to the building blocks. A \d regex parser does not care that the string "555" is not equivalent to "VVV". All it cares about is that there is the digit "5" or "V". In the same vein, regex parser should not try to parse IV as a single symbol.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

It's not just digits. Nobody is expecting it to understand language yet but the parser is-number still returns true for "2e3" or "0x0F". It tells you whether the string can be interpreted as a real numeric value.

[–] bitfucker 1 points 3 months ago

Yeah, hence is-"number". But we were talking about regex are we. A number representation can use digits but it can also not. Much like how you make a number using the word "elf".

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

I feel like there shoul be an ISO/DIN to define this.