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Comment by sbierwagen | Hacker News Reader

>The first thing I've come to appreciate about SQLite is its documentation

I've told this story before, but the first time I used sqlite, years ago, I needed to store a floating point value, so I read the documentation: https://www.sqlite.org/datatype3.html

>REAL. The value is a floating point value, stored as an 8-byte IEEE floating point number.

I parsed this as "an 8-bit floating point number". Wow, I thought. That's weird as hell. Oh well, I guess it's sql lite, ha ha. I went on to implement storing numeric values as text strings, which worked exactly as well as you'd expect. Only months later did I find out that it's a normal regular IEEE double, 64 bits long.

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Is the point of the story that no matter how good the documentation is, we don't read well anyhow? Else, I don't get the point.

Just a funny anecdote. There's not always a point.

I was confused as well. How you phrased it, it seemed that your funny story was about how cool the docs were and saved your ass or something like that :)

It wasn't his, you answered to someone else.

It's funny that under "maybe it was an example of nobody reading shit all" there is a comment where someone didn't read the nickname and thought he's answering to the anectdote's poster comment :D

Right now? Almost half past 12.

Well, I thought it was funny, but I read and understood all of the words.

That's a very salient point. And reading well all the time is super hard. I think that's one of the reasons why people don't write documentation. First of all, who's gonna read all that? Second of all, who's gonna read all of that correctly?

My dad knows very little about computers but he likes joking with me whenever i’m struggling with some technical problem: “8 bits is a byte! That’s all you need to know! How hard could it be?”

That's awesome haha. I aspire to be a dad like that one day xd.

You should tell him this story!

TI C62xx and C64xx DSPs don't understand 8 bit bytes at all and everything was at least 16 bit. There was no uint8_t there, char is 16 bits etc.

More advice for a kid contemplating engineering:

An EE only needs to know that you don't stick your finger in a socket. A mechanical engineer only needs to know that you can't push a rope. And a civil enginer only needs to know that sh*t rolls downhill.

might interest you both that not all bytes are equal

Finding out that there are just 5 datatypes and that BIGINT, VARCHAR, BLOB, etc. are just mapped onto those was actually a breath of fresh air.

Which I think is fine (though you could make a case for a proper datetime type). What I am a lot less of a fan is the dynamic typing, ie that if you have an int column, sqlite will happy store a string in there. I am not sure why they do that but to me, it lets some bugs go unnoticed.

There are STRICT tables in newer versions of Sqlite

I saw that complaint but for all purposes it's a moot issue

If your code allows it you're fucking doomed anyway and will have multiple other type-related problems all over the codebase.

There are a variety of ways that bugs like that could sneak through a codebase.

I was taught to think of a RDMS as the last line of defense against data integrity issues. SQLite, on the other hand, is more than happy to let you shoot yourself in the foot.

I mean if you write database code in PHP or JS fair enough but you're fucking doomed if you do anyway.

> I went on to implement storing numeric values as text strings, which worked exactly as well as you'd expect.

I imagine it went went ok!

They're real, fwiw https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2018/04/15/eight-bit-floating...

>I went on to implement storing numeric values as text strings, which worked exactly as well as you'd expect.

It can be made to work. I would've gone with Binary-Coded Decimal if IEEE 754 standard isn't precise enough.

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