[uf-rest] Introducing JAHAH

[Kevin Marks]

On Jan 5, 2006, at 6:00 PM, Bob Ippolito wrote:

>
> On Jan 5, 2006, at 5:30 PM, Dr. Ernie Prabhakar wrote:
>
>>>> So, has anyone done a JSON<->XOXO bridge?
>>>
>>> I'm not terribly sure why you'd want to do it, the use cases are 
>>> pretty different and they're definitely not 1:1 on features.  JSON 
>>> has no canonical hyperlink representation, and XOXO has no canonical 
>>> representation for null, numbers, booleans, or string:value maps.  
>>> JSON is the plist equivalent for the web.  In fact, it's awfully 
>>> close in syntax to old-style NeXT plists (minus timestamps and 
>>> data).
>>
>> Hmm, not sure what happened to my previous message.  Anyway, 
>> hopefully this will answer your question:
>>
>> http://www.opendarwin.org/~drernie/xoxo-datatypes.html
>>
>> There's even a demo about it here:
>>
>> http://opendarwin.org/~drernie/C499496031/E20051026153908/index.html
>
> I'd drop double, float, and integer in place of a single number type: 
> let's call it number.  The recommended implementation for Number would 
> be a 64-bit floating point number (C double).  This is parity with 
> JavaScript's Number type, Python's float, etc. and has enough bits to 
> represent any number in either of your three types.  I'd also 
> explicitly specify what to do with Inf, -Inf, and NaN; either make 
> them invalid to have in a document, or represented as strings in some 
> way.  If valid, the aforementioned spellings are convenient because 
> that's what JavaScript understands.

Normally I'd agree with you - I am a big fan of duck typing - but it 
depends on the goal. If it is to provide a safe way to round trip data, 
we may need to consider the strongly typed languages too. Sometimes 
integers are what you want to avoid rounding glitches.