Comment by atombender | Hacker News Reader

Comment by atombender | Hacker News Reader

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JSON's number support is a source of problems, because the standard is so informal [1]:

    JSON is agnostic about numbers. ... JSON instead offers
    only the representation of numbers that humans use: a
    sequence of digits

This poses a problem for some languages, and tends to break things. You would expect encode(decode(string)) == string, but languages deal with numbers differently. For example, in Go, if you decode into a map[string]interface{}, you will get float64 by default. If you decode "42" and then encode it back to JSON, you'll get "42.0". (This is the reason Go has a special type you can use, json.Number, that preserves the value as its original string value.)

This mostly causes issues for code that needs to be data-structure-agnostic (in the Go case: decoding into a interface{}, rather than a struct with "json:" tags), but there are edges cases where you can get a surprise. For example, since all numbers are technically both integers and floats, something like {"visitorCount": 42.0} is perfectly valid, and a client has to know to coerce the number into an integer if it wants to deal with it sanely, even though the meaning of that number might be nonsensical if treated as a float.

[1] http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/files/ECMA-ST...

Exactly. JSON Number ARE NOT ACTUAL NUMBERS. They're really restricted strings (or, as you quote, a syntax for representing numbers).

IMO this wasn't originally a bad thing at all. There are so many different types of numbers, with so many different behaviours (does `1` == `1.0`? Not in statistics class) that trying to work it all out in JSON would have been a fools errand. The problem is that so many JSON parsers are overly aggressive about turning JSON Numbers into something specific (usually floats) that when writing a JSON API we have to assume it will be consumed in this lowest-common-denomitor way.

By the way, I don't think that all JSON numbers are technically both integers and floats. `42` and `42.0` are clearly different according to the spec, IMO. I'd be curious to get your thoughts on this.

The spec is too vague; it's "agnostic". A number can include a fractional part, but it doesn't say if that means that fractionless numbers are to be treated as integers. It leaves that to the implementation, which is a terrible idea for an interchange format.

Ruby, IMHO, errs on the side of consistency (fractionless numbers become Fixnum, so encode(decode("1")) => "1"), whereas Go goes the opposite way (all numbers become float64, so encode(decode("1")) => "1.0", unless you enable the magic json.Number type).

JavaScript is an interesting scenario, because JS doesn't even have integer numbers, which means it doesn't have any choice in the matter. Interestingly, Node.js/V8 truncates the fraction if it can: JSON.dump(JSON.parse("1.0")) => "1".

It's a mess.

Thanks for your analysis (and the Ruby and JS reports). The more I think about it the more I think parsers should not parse to numbers by default, but instead to (using a Haskell-based pseudo type):

  data Sign = Positive | Negative

  data Digit = Zero | One ... Eight | Nine

  data JSONNumber = JSONNumber
    { _sign           :: Maybe Sign
    , _integerPart    :: [Digit]
    , _fractionalPart :: Maybe [Digit]
    }

Actually this should include exponents as well -- basically parsers should just report exactly what the spec allows, without coercing to float or whatever.

Of course, users of the parsers could ask to have a number converted to a float, but that wouldn't be the default.

We're a long way from that though. At the moment I don't even feel like I can write a protocol that expected implementations to distinguish `1` and `1.0`. This should not be the case.

> At the moment I don't even feel like I can write a protocol that expected implementations to distinguish `1` and `1.0`.

Indeed you can't, among other reasons because that distinction doesn't exist in JavaScript, but ... why would you want to make such a subtle distinction?

If you really want what you described above, you can get it by using a string.

I respect the pragmatism of your reply. At the same time "distinguish decimals and integers" is about as far from a subtle distinction as you can get.

The distinction may be familiar to us, but if you ask someone on the street, "1" and "1.0" are the same number. The habit we have of giving them different types is somewhat arbitrary.

It sounds like what you're saying is that it should be deserialized as Java's BigDecimal, or whatever the equivalent of that is in a given/language framework; and if there isn't one, then the JSON parser should provide that equivalent.

> JSON Number ARE NOT ACTUAL NUMBERS.

Well, no. They're numbers as humans think about them.

(Cue the saying about programming being a job where you hate yourself for not thinking enough like a computer)

Almost two weeks late, but I thought about this more and I totally agree with you.

I should have said "JSON number's aren't machine numbers" (e.g. float, double, integer). But serialized, human-readable numbers are still numbers, so I was wrong.

> You would expect encode(decode(string)) == string

With Unicode string handling I already wouldn't expect that, not to mention whitespace. However, I would expect that dec(enc(dec(string))) === dec(string)

> {"visitorCount": 42.0} is perfectly valid

The problem here is not necessarily that the standard is informal, but that languages differ in the number types they offer. Treating "42.0" as something different from "42" is after all just another convention and not a universal one. In other words, having to coerce something to an integer is more a property of the environment than a problem with JSON.

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