On 2024-09-30, Dan Sommers via Python-list <python-list@python.org> wrote: > On 2024-09-30 at 11:44:50 -0400, > Grant Edwards via Python-list <python-list@python.org> wrote: > >> On 2024-09-30, Left Right via Python-list <python-list@python.org> wrote: >> > [...] >> > Imagine a pathological case of this shape: 1... <60GB of digits>. This >> > is still a valid JSON (it doesn't have any limits on how many digits a >> > number can have). And you cannot parse this number in a streaming way >> > because in order to do that, you need to start with the least >> > significant digit. >> >> Which is how arabic numbers were originally parsed, but when >> westerners adopted them from a R->L written language, thet didn't >> flip them around to match the L->R written language into which they >> were being adopted. > > Interesting. > >> So now long numbers can't be parsed as a stream in software. They >> should have anticipated this problem back in the 13th century and >> flipped the numbers around. > > What am I missing? Handwavingly, start with the first digit, and as > long as the next character is a digit, multipliy the accumulated > result by 10 (or the appropriate base) and add the next value. > [...] But why do I need to start with the least significant digit?
Excellent question. That's actully a pretty standard way to parse numeric literals. I accepted the claim at face value that in JSON there is something that requires parsing numeric literals from the least significant end -- but I can't think of why the usual algorithms used by other languages' lexers for yonks wouldn't work for JSON. -- Grant -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
