On Sat, Jan 12, 2013 at 1:36 PM, Dirk Hohndel dirk@hohndel.org wrote:
Well this works, but I really would LIKE a string.
Absolutely. The serial number *has* to be a string. Serial numbers really aren't numbers.
The "identification number" (the thing that libdivecomputer now calls the serial number) can be a 32-bit number. That always works for identification, even if for some dive computers it might then have to be some hash of the "real" identification mark. But serial numbers simply aren't numbers. They have dashes, they have letters, they have specific formats. Even when they are "numbers" they may have very specific limits ("6 decimal digits zero-padded" or whatever)
So despite being called "numbers", they are very much strings. They CAN NOT be represented as a numeric entity.
Linus