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Works for email, phone numbers and addresses, too.
by fmakunbound 4y ago
Works for email, phone numbers and addresses, too.
- a1369209993 4y agoActually, it doesn't. All of those are, well, addresses, and have some mechanical structure necessary for routing (admittedly, for phone numbers, the structure amounts to "any sequence of 0-9, #, *, and possibly those four wierd extra symbols with the fourth DTMF column tone"). You probably don't (or least shouldn't) care about that structure as long as it routes correctly, but it does exist. (Ie, you'd still use a string for that data, but it's not inherently incorrect not to, just pointless and error-prone.)
- tesseract 4y agoI think the point is that someone else cares about the structure and sets its rules - which may change without warning or have complexity you are unaware of - and therefore if you are not the telephone company or the post office you are likely overstepping if you try to enforce structure rather than merely passing along what you were given.