Re: The hypothetical __serialize metamethod (was Re: [ANN] luaproc 1.0-4)

[steve donovan <steve.j.donovan@...>]

On Wed, Oct 7, 2015 at 7:01 PM, Andrew Starks <andrew.starks@trms.com> wrote:
> One question: In a human readable format, how would you represent
> floating point numbers that don't have a perfect string
> representation?

Well, most floating-point numbers don't have an exact representation
in 64-bits anyway. There are the 'specials' INF and NAN but they can
be special-cased.

It's the old trade-off between efficiency and discoverability, really.
Diagnosing problems with binary formats is harder.