Re: [Json] Limitations on number size?

[Jacob Davies <[e-mail]>]

On Tue, Jul 9, 2013 at 7:42 PM, John Cowan <[e-mail]> wrote:
> Apparently, there are already practical problems with interchanging
> 64-bit longs: google for [json large numbers bugs] for lots of reports.

The canonical one was Twitter IDs, where they had to introduce a
(string) field in their JSON APIs called "id_str" which is not
guaranteed to be equal to the obsolete-but-included (number) field
"id".

> While there are apparently int32-only systems out there, it's clearly
> understood that they are unusually restricted: such is not the case
> for JavaScript-hosted implementations.

Yes, this is why I think the specification itself should note that for
interoperability with Javascript, the Javascript size limitations must
be respected, even if the specification does not require that in
itself. The number of JSON-to-Javascript implementations or uses must
surely outnumber all other uses of JSON by several orders of magnitude
so I'd argue that as far as "running code" goes the limitation on
practical, interoperable number size is quite real and surprising to
people trying to send data to Javascript from non-JS environments
where larger numbers are available. (I went so far in the Java
libraries I wrote as to encode/decode longs & Big* as strings.)