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…”
Or even funnier: It gets parsed in octal, which does yield a valid zip code. Good luck finding that.
I’m not sure if you’re getting it, so I’ll explain just in case.
In computer science a few conventions have emerged on how numbers should be interpreted, depending on how they start:
- decimal (the usual system with digits from 0 to 9): no prefix
- binary (digits 0 and 1): prefix
0b, so0b1001110 - octal (digits 0 through 7): prefix
0, so0116 - hexadecimal (digits 0 through 9 and then A through E): prefix
0x, so0x8E
If your zip code starts with 9, it won’t be interpreted as octal. You’re fine.
Well, you’re right. I wasn’t getting it, but I’ve also never seen any piece of software that would treat a single leading zero as octal. That’s just a recipe for disaster, and it should use 0 to be unambiguous
(I am a software engineer, but was assuming you meant it was hardcoded to parse as octal, not some weird auto-detect)
Who tf decided that a 0 prefix means base 8 in the first place? If a time machine was invented somehow I’m going to cap that man, after the guy that created JavaScript.
Oof.
I guess this is one of the reasons that some linters now scream if you don’t provide base when parsing numbers. But then again good luck finding it if it happens internally. Still, I feel like a ZIP should be treated as a string even if it looks like a number.
Yep. Much like we don’t treat phone numbers like a number. The rule of thumb is that if you don’t do any arithmetic with it, it is not a “number” but numeric.
Well, we don’t, but every electonic tables software out in the wild on the other hand…
/j
Yes, I know that you can force it to become text by prepending ' to the phone, choose an appropriate format for the cells, etc, etc
The point is that this often requires meddling after the phone gets displayed as something like 3e10
