conversion error

[Heiner Marxen]

Hello,

The following awk script fails for gawk 3.1.4 and 3.1.5.
Older versions did not do this, but I cannot say, how old they were.

BEGIN {
    if( 0 ) {           #ok
        t = "8"
    }else {             #fails
        t = ""
        t = t "8"
    }
    printf("8  = %d\n", 0+t)    # ok without this line
    t = t "8"                   # does not invalidate numeric interpretation
    printf("88 = %s\n", 0+t)
    ## The above prints "88 = 8" with gawk 3.1.4 and 3.1.5
}


The following one-liner already exhibits the bug:

gawk 'BEGIN{t=""; t=t "8";printf("8=%d\n", 0+t);t=t "8";printf("88=%s\n", 0+t)}'


Preliminary observation: under somewhat strange conditions a variable
does retain its numeric interpretation although something is appended to it.
-- 
Heiner Marxen                           http://www.drb.insel.de/~heiner/