Re: Improving JSON pretty printing, how to represent floats?

[Dmitry Gutov <dmitry@gutov.dev>]

On 05/04/2024 17:20, Herman, Géza wrote:
> 
> Dmitry Gutov <dmitry@gutov.dev> writes:
> 
>> On 05/04/2024 12:39, Herman, Géza wrote:
>>> What would be the best representation for numbers in this case? I'm 
>>> thinking about using symbols, but I'm not sure this is the
>>> best approach.  The parser/encoder would have a new keyword 
>>> parameter, like ":numbers-as-symbols t".  If this is specified, then
>>> numbers wouldn't be parsed, but kept as symbols.  What do you think, 
>>> is this a good approach?
>>
>> Why not just use strings? Bignum implementations in various libs 
>> (other languages) often use strings in constructors.
> 
> Because then the original type is lost: Later it's not possible to tell 
> whether a value was a number or a string originally.
> 
>>
>> Interning numbers in obarray doesn't seems like too great an idea.
> 
> That's correct, my idea is to use uninterned symbols (make-symbol).

Okay, then that's not a problem. You could use a more complex type (like 
a struct), but that doesn't seem urgent.

OTOH, Mattias also has a point that high performance is not as important 
here, and maybe a Lisp implementation would be preferable over adding a 
slightly clunkier interface to the parser function.