In the design of YAML, Ingy made the case that we shouldn't have types for scalar values, that they should all just be strings. His argument was that each appli

In the design of YAML, Ingy made the case that we shouldn't have types for scalar values, that they should all just be strings. His argument was that each application knows what it needs and should have the ability to direct how those scalars are processed. If the format needs to be standardized across applications, one can use a schema system layered on top. In retrospect, I think he was right and I was wrong. For example, Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) serialized as JSON treat numeric values as decimals, e.g. `2.3` is not a floating point value. Moreover, since parsing numbers is slow, it should be deferred till you actually need to interpret the numeric value.