<p>Puzzled by the Lua 5.0 documentation references to things like <code>_LOADED</code>, <code>LUA_PATH</code>, <code>_ALERT</code> and so on (that I could not use in Lua 5.1), I discovered all of those have been removed and the functionality put elsewhere. Am I right in thinking that the only one global variable left in Lua 5.1 is <code>_VERSION</code>?</p>

I'm not familiar with regexes, so forgive me if this answer's off-base.  I've been assuming that $3, $2, and $1 are strings.  Here's what I did in IRB to replicate the problem:
```
```
irb(main):003:0> Integer("04")
=> 4
irb(main):004:0> Integer("09")
ArgumentError: invalid value for Integer: "09"
    from (irb):4:in `Integer'
    from (irb):4
    from :0
```
```
But it looks like .to_i doesn't have the same issues:
```
```
irb(main):005:0> "04".to_i
=> 4
irb(main):006:0> "09".to_i
=> 9
```
```