Introduction
In the B4P language, numbers are numeric values which optionally contain decimal points. The same applies to reading numbers from tables. Following rules apply:
- It must contain at least 1 digit (0..9)
- Negative numebers start with a minus sign (see: unary operators)
- The number must not contain spaces and/or thousand separator symbols. Use clean num() to remove such symbols automatically.
- At most one decimal point may be used. More points inside make the value look like a plain text.
- A lone decimal describes a plain text containing one character.
- At least one digit must be added before or after the decimal point, e.g. 5. or .5 are OK, specifying 5 and 0.5.
- Leading zeros in front and trailing zeros after the digits after the comma are OK
- Scientific notation: Not supported for the reason that some coded data (e.g. special abbreviations) may look similar to scientific notation. See next section for more details..
- However, use num() or clean num() to specify scientific notations.
- Exceptions: Table entries may contain numbers in scientific notation, but use table configure() to activate reading scientific notation.
- Scientific notation is also supported in numbers in JSON files. See variable load() to load JSON files.
echo( 1 ); // Simple numeral
echo( 1 1 + 2 2 ); // Attention: These two numbers are strings : '1 12 2' is returned, not '33' or '3 3'
echo( 123.45 );
echo( 0123.450 ); // Same value as above
echo( 0123.450 *1); // Operation applied (multplied by 1), therefore text representation has been dropped1
1 12 2
123.45
0123.450
123.45