3 ms·
Honestly that seems like a cop out.
by kenjackson 5y ago
Honestly that seems like a cop out.
- Spivak 5y agoI mean strings are numbers if you want to be that reductive. The “on-disk” representation of the thing is independent of its real type and properties. So sure, store a date in an “integer” but if you try to treat it like one instead of a bitfield you’ve made an error and if your storage isn’t wide enough to hold all dates that’s gonna be a PITA later.
- marcosdumay 5y agoThe usual habit of typing ids as integral numbers is incorrect, they are not numbers. But the problems it causes are well known and dealt with by what is broadly known as good practices. Is it better this way? (You can see the problems clashing with each other if you search for discussions about defaulting ids to 32 or 64 bits. So they are not completely solved, the practices are just good enough that things don't usually break on practice.) At the end of the day, all you have on a computer is a bitfield to mess around. You will always have to deal with encoding at some point.