4 ms·

> Anything with a REST api or JSON doesn’t have native support for Decimals This is a very slight nitpick (that might be wrong) but I think it's perfectly in l

• samwillis 5y ago
  You are right, both the ECMA. standard and RFC leave the implementation of numbers open to the parser and language: "JSON is agnostic about the semantics of numbers. In any programming language, there can be a variety of number types of various capacities and complements, fixed or floating, binary or decimal. That can make interchange between different programming languages difficult. JSON instead offers only the representation of numbers that humans use: a sequence of digits. All programming languages know how to make sense of digit sequences even if they disagree on internal representations. That is enough to allow interchange." https://www.ecma-international.org/wp-content/uploads/ECMA-404_2nd_edition_december_2017.pdf https://www.ecma-international.org/wp-content/uploads/ECMA-4... https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7159 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7159 And most JSON parsers allow you to extend and change how types are handled. I think however from a developer point of view by standardising on ints you reduce the risk of making a mistake in your implementation. I think the point is though that as long as your system doesn't need to handle fractions of a cent/pence/etc then using them as the base representation and only doing integer math makes the system simpler. It moves the complexity of currency to the display layer away from the business layer. Obviously there are times when you need to be able to handle smaller units and a decimal type would be correct there.