> You're missing a major feature. Text formats don't have any natural integer size limits. Sure they do. Where do you think Y2K came from? RFC 822 said "years

> You're missing a major feature. Text formats don't have any natural integer size limits. Sure they do. Where do you think Y2K came from? RFC 822 said "years are two digits" and people wrote parsers to that spec. Even now the official rule (AFAIK) is two or four digits, not an arbitrary number of digits. And even when the spec has no limit, implementations often intrude. For a more current example, JSON has no "natural" numeric size limits, but interoperability of integers greater than 2^53 is problematic because some implementations assume double-precision floating point while others can parse larger numbers into a 64-bit integer. Limits are a part of protocol design; a good protocol should make them clearly defined, suitably sized, and feasible to change.