adventures in ignorance: hex vs oct

At one time I must have known this, but, like many parts of Perl I don't use on a common basis, it must have fallen out of my head. The hex function does exactly what I would expect it to do; that is it turns a string of hexadecimal digits into a Perl number. It can also handle strings that start with "0x". However, the oct function does significantly more than I would expect it to. In addition to converting strings of octal digits to Perl numbers, it can convert hexadecimal numbers (if they start with "0x") and binary numbers (if they start with "0b"). The reason for this is obvious: hex can't determine if "0b10" is binary for 2 or hexadecimal for 2_832, but oct can. There is no common convert function for the same reason. I do still find it odd that hex throws a warning and returns zero when confronted with leading spaces, but has no problem with trailing spaces.

#!/usr/bin/perl

use perl5i;

my @strings = ("10  ", "  10", "0b10", "010", "0x10");

say "testing hex:";
for my $string (@strings) {
    say "\thex '$string' is '", hex $string, "'";
}

say "testing oct:";
for my $string (@strings) {
    say "\toct '$string' is '", oct $string, "'";
}