I think the real question has to be: how do we determine what the regulations should be. Today, regulations are typically the product of dysfunctional political processes, and, no surprise, a lot of those regulations are unhelpful and a lot of helpful regulations are absent.
The problem is that sometimes it is not a necessary condition. Rather, the tests might have been checking implementation details or just been wrong in the first place. Now, when tests fails I have extra work to figure out if its a real break or just a bad test.
There is likely a cost to the infrastructure necessary to enable calling 911 that scales with the number of users not the number of 911 calls. Where I'm at, there is a 75 cent per month fee added to phone plans to cover the costs of access to 911. If most people are on the free plan, the margin from the few paying customers won't cover it.
It sounds to me like you are thinking something like: if they use XML, they'll have a well defined schema and will follow standardized XML types. But if they use JSON they may not have a well-defined schema at all, and may not follow any sort of standardized formats.
But to my mind, whether they have a well-defined schema and follow proper datatypes really has very little to do with the choice of XML or JSON.
My specific claim was that you could represent it in JSON, so you can't claim, as the post I responded to did, that JSON "cannot be used."
I'll fully grant, I don't want to write a document by hand in either of the JSON formats I suggested. Although, given the choice, I'd rather receive it in that format to be parsed than in any XML format.
I think I can see something of where you're coming from. But a question:
You complain about dates in JSON (really a specific case of parsing text in JSON):
> If they implement dates, sometimes it's unix-time, sometimes it's 1000x off from > that, sometimes it's a ISO8601-inspired string, and fuck sometimes I just get an > HTTP date. And so on.
Sure, but does not XML have the exact same problem because everything is just a text?
What actually prevents JSON from being used in these spaces? It seems to me that any XML structure can be represented in JSON. Personally, I've yet to come across an XML document I didn't wish was JSON, but perhaps in spaces I haven't worked with, it exists.
Well, if they did that, then people could expect/demand stability with regard to what scenarios get the checks/panics optimized out. This would be a bit of a burden for the Rust maintainers. It would effectively make the optimizer part of the language specification, and that's undesireable.
But the great thing about Rust is that the panic traces back to the exact place where I thought something couldn't be None, but it was. In Java, I frequently found it mysterious why some variable or parameter was unexpectedly null.
I think the causation runs in the opposite direction. These exceptions for these platforms were implemented in an inefficient fashion BECAUSE they thought that exceptions should almost never be thrown.