I missed that module when I was searching for it on the CPAN. Bummer.

I find it interesting what extremely different styles our solutions have. Your's is quite procedural. Using a parser is declarative. What I find interesting about the latter is how one can pretty much rearrange all of the declarative portions of the parser and things still work as intended. This gives one a lot of flexibility.

It's also (relatively) easy to extend. If I want to turn it into a calculator which responds appropriately to "divide three by seven and add twelve point two", I can do that. Further, it would merely build on what's there and nothing else would need to be touched. I wonder how feasible this is with a procedural model.

In any event, your speculation was correct. My post was primarily intended to show off the power of the HOP::Parser as opposed to "hey, let's turn words into numbers!"