[Terr_]

> Javascript WILL interpret your bigints as Number()

A similar horror story from PHP, which I discovered by diagnosing a test failure. (Or maybe it was in production? Long ago, can't remember.)

I think the code in question was for some kind of web auth, comparing random 32-character hexadecimal strings. PHP has a "feature" where its == operator falls back to trying certain strings as numbers... and that includes a version with scientific notation. (12000 == "12000" == "12e3")

Such a collision through bad comparison may seem unlikely, but there are two islands of higher odds: 0*10^X is zero for any X, and X*10^0 is one for any X. Finally, leading zeros can be included. ("0e1234" == "00000e1" and "1234e0" == "9e0000")

The fix was simply going to stricter ===, but it definitely reinforced my dislike of "loose" languages.