I can’t believe people did this, but they did and it wasn’t even their fault. Reader Rob Kolstad brings a story where SSNs were processed with AWK. Great, AWK was a fabulous fast tool to process text before we had perl and now python. Except AWK at the time happily defaults numbers to 32 bit float (today it’s a 64 bit float) and can drop quite a few bits of precision from an SSN. To show what can go wrong with 32 bit floats with SSNs
Don't serialize SSNs as floats
Don't serialize SSNs as floats
Don't serialize SSNs as floats
I can’t believe people did this, but they did and it wasn’t even their fault. Reader Rob Kolstad brings a story where SSNs were processed with AWK. Great, AWK was a fabulous fast tool to process text before we had perl and now python. Except AWK at the time happily defaults numbers to 32 bit float (today it’s a 64 bit float) and can drop quite a few bits of precision from an SSN. To show what can go wrong with 32 bit floats with SSNs