ml> not all proposals are accepted or if accepted, stick around...
Too bad they missed out on the opportunity to not accept a few of them that stick around when they have no right to exist in the first place.
ml> somewhere inside it, there is a conversion from string to ml> numerics and back to string again
No doubt. However it REQUIRES the first character in the string to be either a '+' (east) or a '-' (west). Note the REQUIRE and that is part and parcel of the offset ... which is always a string ... which is always NaN. Dropping the '+' character ist vorboten.