All numbers should just be floats

[vincent99]

The intricacies of when a variable is an int vs a float is confusing since you don't declare the type anywhere. JS/JSON/YAML (mostly/effectively) just have a single number type.

This will fail because foos is implicitly an int:

args: {
  foos: 4
}
...

acorn run ... --foos=4.5

Numbers should just all be floats internally.

[hikhvar]

I would argue, that using floats by default is a bad choice. Floats have imprecision and thus, you specify something like: acorn run ... --foos=12378712311112331233, and the conversion to float will create an imprecision as you can see in this snipped: https://go.dev/play/p/nkMesfzt6tW

[vincent99]

All integers <2^53 are exactly representable as a 64-bit float (your example is ~2^60).

Above that storing numbers as "integers" still leads to hard to reproduce recipient- & value-dependent trouble. e.g. passing through JSON or in a UI (which we will have...) because JS only has "numbers" (64-bit float).

If you're dealing with numbers that big (9 quadrillion+) the only reliable way to transmit them is as strings.

I do think the parser could give you a useful error and stop you if you try though.

[cjellick]

moving out of v0.4.0 because i dont think @ibuildthecloud will get to it in october

[cjellick]

assigning to @ibuildthecloud because I bucket this as part of the AML work