Re: [boost] [review][JSON] json::value as a vocabulary type

On Fri, Sep 25, 2020 at 6:11 AM Mathias Gaunard via Boost wrote:

On Thu, 24 Sep 2020 at 10:57, Andrzej Krzemienski via Boost wrote:

...

My understanding of a "vocabulary type" is that it should be usable (not necessarily with maximum efficiency) for *any* usage. In the case of JSON that would mean that I should be able to represent any value that corresponds to a valid JSON when converted to text. I do not think that json::value can claim that without the ability to serialize arbitrarily big numbers.

I fully agree with this statement. json::value *needs* to support arbitrary numbers. It's incomplete without it. Maybe the author of multiprecision can advise on the best type to use there (gmp or mpfr?).

This is not a reasonable requirement. std::string is the canonical C++ vocabulary type. On 32-bit systems, it cannot represent 5GB-long strings. Depending on platform limitations, it usually cannot even represent more than 2GB-long strings. Computers are limited to finite resources. Putting finite limits on the representation of all kinds of values is normal, not unexpected -- this is especially true of numeric values. Zach