Meme transcription:

Panel 1: Bilbo Baggins ponders, “After all… why should I care about the difference between int and String?

Panel 2: Bilbo Baggins is revealed to be an API developer. He continues, “JSON is always String, anyways…”

  • JackbyDevEnglish
    1•6 days ago

    I’m not following your point so I think I might be misunderstanding it. If the types of numbers you want to express are literally incapable of being expressed using JSON numbers then yes, you should absolutely use string (or maybe even an object of multiple fields).

    • ladEnglish
      1•6 days ago

      The point is that everything is expressable as JSON numbers, it’s when those numbers are read by JS there’s an issue

      • JackbyDevEnglish
        1•5 days ago

        Can you give a specific example? Might help me understand your point.

        • ladEnglish
          1•5 days ago

          I am not sure what could be the example, my point was that the spec and the RFC are very abstract and never mention any limitations on the number content. Of course the implementations in the language will be more limited than that, and if limitations are different, it will create dissimilar experience for the user, like this: Why does JSON.parse corrupt large numbers and how to solve this

          • JackbyDevEnglish
            1•5 days ago

            This is what I was getting at here https://programming.dev/comment/10849419 (although I had a typo and said big instead of bug). The problem is with the parser in those circumstances, not the serialization format or language.

            • lad
              1•5 days ago

              I disagree a bit in that the schema often doesn’t specify limits and operates in JSON standard’s terms, it will say that you should get/send a number, but will not usually say at what point will it break.

              This is the opposite of what C language does, being so specific that it is not even turing complete (in a theoretical sense, it is practically)

              • JackbyDevEnglish
                2•5 days ago

                Then the problem is the schema being under specified. Take the classic pet store example. It says that the I’d is int64. https://petstore3.swagger.io/#/store/placeOrder

                If some API is so underspecified that it just says “number” then I’d say the schema is wrong. If your JSON parser has no way of passing numbers as arbitrary length number types (like BigDecimal in Java) then that’s a problem with your parser.

                I don’t think the truly truly extreme edge case of things like C not technically being able to simulate a truly infinite tape in a Turing machine is the sort of thing we need to worry about. I’m sure if the JSON object you’re parsing is some astronomically large series of nested objects that specifications might begin to fall apart too (things like the maximum amount of memory any specific processor can have being a finite amount), but that doesn’t mean the format is wrong.

                And simply choosing to “use string instead” won’t solve any of these crazy hypotheticals.

                • ladEnglish
                  1•4 days ago

                  Underspecified schema is indeed a problem, but I find it too common to just shrug it off

                  Also, you’re very right that just using strings will not improve the situation 🤝