Strange sorting

[Derek Atkins]

"Anthony Dardis" <adardis at gmail.com> writes:

> Speaking as an old young programmer, seems like it would be
> non-trivial for the "interpret as octal" hook to grab onto the
> transaction number  field, since it appears to be a string. But stuff
> happens.

I don't understand why you think this is non-trivial.  The 'order'
function has the following code in it:

    /* otherwise, sort on number string */
    na = atoi(ta->num);
    nb = atoi(tb->num);
    if (na < nb) return -1;
    if (na > nb) return +1;

The problem is that the "convert string to number" function that was
used had an implicit "leading zero means interpret as octal" side-effect
(I believe it was using effectively strtol(x, NULL, 0)).  The code
currently uses atoi() which should explicitly be decimal, but perhaps we
should change it to an explicit strtol(ta->num, NULL, 10).  Regardless,
any change will not go into the never-being-touched-again 2.2 branch,
because we don't plan on a 2.2.10 release.

-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
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