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Paul Joseph Davis commented on COUCHDB-1410: -------------------------------------------- So this whole thing has really gotten blown out of proportion. While we have never formally documented what's going on internally, it can be described as such: A number is parsed into one of two forms: If the number contains a decimal point (".") or an exponent ("e" or "E") then the number is internally converted into an IEEE-754 floating point representation. This means that numbers containing either a decimal point or exponent are subject to the constraints of having a finite number of bits representing the number as is standard operating procedure. If a number does not contain a decimal point or exponent then it is parsed as an integer with (theoretically) no loss of precision (I think precision is bound by the amount of RAM IIRC but I don't promise there aren't any bugs). (Side note for Jiffy, technically, if a number fits in a signed 64bit representation, that is used. If not then parsing is deferred back to Erlang which handles parsing as a bignum). Literally, the only thing that's wrong in COUCHDB-1407 is that number formatting for doubles changed a wee bit and it has a simple fix and now people are getting all crazy about numbers and ignoring other places that JSON is munged. Blergh. > Formally define number support > ------------------------------ > > Key: COUCHDB-1410 > URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/COUCHDB-1410 > Project: CouchDB > Issue Type: Improvement > Affects Versions: 1.2 > Reporter: Robert Newson > Priority: Blocker > Fix For: 1.3 > > > The JSON spec has a very loose definition of Number. CouchDB, as a database, > should have well-defined and first class support for numbers (both integral > and decimal). The precision of number support should be formally specified as > should the algorithm used to represent floating-point values, especially > where an approximation must be made in the conversion. -- This message is automatically generated by JIRA. If you think it was sent incorrectly, please contact your JIRA administrators: https://issues.apache.org/jira/secure/ContactAdministrators!default.jspa For more information on JIRA, see: http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira