I am looking for a simple, fast, reliable and safe way to parse a number stored in a string.

Is there really no way to do this?

It is quite ridiculous that the Wolfram Language is now being pushed as a general purpose language, yet it still lacks really basic stuff such as parsing an integer with reasonable performance.

The best I could come up with was

ClearAll[parse]
parse[str_String] :=
 With[{res = Quiet@ToExpression[str, InputForm, Unevaluated]},
  If[NumberQ[res], res, $Failed]
  ]

And this is far from trivial code. It requires a good understanding of evaluation control.

Is it really renaming everything from M to Wolfram what was needed to convince people to take it seriously as a general purpose language rather than a CAS?

wolfram.com/mathematica/pricing/service-plans/…

I have been using the Premier Service program for at least 15 years or so, and did extend my license for three more years recently. Now I noticed that many of the features that I seem to recall belonged to PS (online storage, cloud credits, CDF deployment, email support etc) moved to a 60% more expensive Premier Service Plus program. I feel a bit taken aback by that. Anyone else shares that feeling?