nicolas cellier wrote:
...

> 
> What do you vote for ? exception, answering 0, any other idea ?
> What to do with the stream in case of error ? rewind, keep in place ?
> I'am waiting for your comments.
> 

Answering nil of course. To answer 0 is outright wrong and raising an 
exception is at least to cumbersome. One could rate it being wrong too, 
because unknown text that has to be converted is a valid input, and thus 
finding no correct float is a valid result - nil.

Regards,
Martin