Wait is this article saying that there is no good/obvious/standard function to parse a string to a number and has the two obvious outputs of such a function (th

Wait is this article saying that there is no good/obvious/standard function to parse a string to a number and has the two obvious outputs of such a function (the number, and a bool or error code)? Even a person in the 60s would realize that that’s the api for conversion from a string to a number (or any conversion that might fail)! What happened? Why do these functions even exist?