parse-number

[Daniel L. Weinreb <dlw at SCRC-TENEX at MIT-MC>]

Ah.  That reminds me why parse-number works the way it does.
parse-number is intended to be a tool to help you parse your way through
a string.  If you encounter a digit on your way from the left end of the
string to the right end, you call parse-number, and it reads in as much
of the string as is a number and tells you where it stopped so that you
can continue to parse the string.  Whether you expected the entire
string to be a number or not is up to you, and parse-number can be
useful in both cases so the "best" default value for the
fail-if-not-whole-string argument is not obvious.  I don't think it's
too important as long as the documentation makes it clear.