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Comment by bagful | Hacker News Reader

I love AWK. Its stringly-typedness would make a Javascript programmer blush: 0, “”, and actually-nothing are identically falsey. Numbers are no different from strings representing numbers, like Lua. Somehow, I don’t mind — if you really need to keep your numbers numbers and strings strings, sigilate the value (prepend with #/$) and peel it off with a substr() later.

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I like the way Lua handles strings and numbers quite a bit. They're different types, but arithmetic will convert a string to a number when it can.

This is without footguns, because concatenation is a different operator entirely.

    2 + "3"  -- 5 
    2 .. "3" -- "23"

It's rather convenient, especially when you can combine it with LPeg to parse files with numbers in them, then do the maths directly.

Lua does not represent numbers with strings. It does have number type which is always floating-point.

Integers were introduced in 5.3.

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