On: Twitter IDs to roll past 53 bits in a couple days (may break javascript apps)

[flyosity]

Tweets come back ordered newest to oldest so there's nothing to order if you don't want to. And accessing since_id or max_id just to send it back to Twitter is exactly what I was referring to: no math to be done, just storing & accessing a value so it doesn't have to be in number format.

In a more practical application, a timeline comes back and the top-most and bottom-most IDs are stored. When a user gets to the bottom an API call is made to load more so you look at the bottom-most ID. If they want to load new tweets you look at the top-most ID. No math needed, just looking up values. They could've been strings all along and it wouldn't have mattered much.

[riffraff → flyosity]

I said that there are more operations than favouring and replying by id.

I don't understand how saying you're gonna access the timeline without looking at the values denies that.

Moreover, I did not object to using strings, I said you only want them to be orderable.