- cross-posted to:
- programmerhumor@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- programmerhumor@lemmy.ml
Meme transcription:
Panel 1: Bilbo Baggins ponders, “After all… why should I care about the difference between int and String?
Panel 2: Bilbo Baggins is revealed to be an API developer. He continues, “JSON is always String, anyways…”
Well shit, my zip code starts with a 9.
I’m not sure if you’re getting it, so I’ll explain just in case.
In computer science a few conventions have emerged on how numbers should be interpreted, depending on how they start:
0b, so0b10011100, so01160x, so0x8EIf your zip code starts with 9, it won’t be interpreted as octal. You’re fine.
Well, you’re right. I wasn’t getting it, but I’ve also never seen any piece of software that would treat a single leading zero as octal. That’s just a recipe for disaster, and it should use
0o116to be unambiguous(I am a software engineer, but was assuming you meant it was hardcoded to parse as octal, not some weird auto-detect)
I thought JavaScript did that, but it turns out it doesn’t. I thought Java did that, but it turns out it doesn’t. Python did it until version 2.7: https://docs.python.org/2.7/library/functions.html#int. C still does it: https://en.cppreference.com/w/c/string/byte/strtol
Interesting that
strtolin C does that. I’ve always explicitly passed in base 10 or 16, but I didn’t know it would auto-detect if you passed 0. TIL.It’s been a long time, but I’m pretty sure C treats a leading zero as octal in source code. PHP and Node definitely do. Yes, it’s a bad convention. It’s much worse if that’s being done by a runtime function that parses user input, though. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen that somewhere in the past, but no idea where. Doesn’t seem likely to be common.
Node doesn’t.
> parseInt('077') 77https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/parseInt