On Numeric Types

See also

The two built-in numeric types: Integer and Decimal.

Interpreting JSON Numbers

JSON has a single numeric type: number. JSON numbers are in the decimal system, they can be positive and negative, they can have a fractional part, and they can have an exponent. Numbers are unlimited in size. They are a formalization of scientific notation.

A JSON number can be one of three things:

  1. An integer

  2. An arbitary-precision approximation of a real number

  3. An exact decimal fraction

The first two cases represent general purpose numbers, the third is a specialized numeric type, useful for accounting and scientific software – software that requires exact numbers and is tied to the decimal system.

Note

The latest version of the JSON spec, RFC 7159 does not require implementations to support arbitrary-precision decimals, allowing them to sacrifice exactness and precision as they see fit. In fact, according that spec, the only truly interoperable numbers are integers ranging from -(2^53)+1 to (2^53)-1. This makes the author a very sad panda.

Teleport’s design is guided by JSON in its full, correct form, despite the fact that some JSON implementations could not support it. This is done partly because it is The Right Thing to do, and partly because implementing JSON correctly is not that difficult. For example, extra work must be performed to map JSON numbers to floats, whereas reading them correctly as decimals is trivial.

Floats vs. Decimals

Floats are fixed-precision approximations of a real numbers, stored in a non-trivial binary format allowing for very fast and reasonably correct hardware calculations. Floats have been designed so well that for most inexact arithmetic, a programmer will never run into their limitations. It is easy to forget that floats are a carefully crafted standard, not a fundamental number representation.

By default, the json module from the Python standard library maps non-integer JSON numbers to floats. This is a practical design decision made by most JSON software and Teleport supports it completely. Nevertheless, Teleport does not define a Float type, opting instead for Decimal. Why is that?

There are two reasons: one philosophical and the other practical. The philosophical reason is that JSON numbers simply are decimals, for better or for worse. The practical reason is that mapping floats to decimals is not trivial.

Consider the float value represented by 1.1 in Python. Because floats are not stored in base 10, the actual value in memory looks more like this:

>>> (1.1).as_integer_ratio()
(2476979795053773, 2251799813685248)

If you perform long division on these numbers, you will get a repeating decimal. Needless to say, JSON numbers are not capable of representing this number exactly, the best we can do is represent it with slightly more precision than the underlying float, so it could be unambiguously parsed back into its original binary form.

If you need exact float representations, then this hex string is by far the simplest, most robust option:

>>> (1.1).hex()
'0x1.199999999999ap+0'

However, floats were designed for inexact arithmetic, for which purpose the Decimal type with its arbitrary precision is perfectly adequate. An exact float representation is conceivably useful, but only for low-level hacks, which are outside of the scope of this project.

Accounting Software

Floats are not acceptable for representing currency values in accounting software. It is possible to implement correct accounting algorithms using floats, but if you wish to do it, be prepared to write mathematical proofs.

Currency values are fixed-precision decimals, so they can be represented trivially and safely using Teleport’s Decimal type. It should be noted that by making this choice, you are limiting yourself to those implementations of JSON which support arbitrary-precision decimals, like Python’s json module.