I'm looking at script.h in BitcoinQT, in a definition of ValueString() and see this:
inline std::string ValueString(const std::vector<unsigned char>& vch)
{
if (vch.size() <= 4)
return strprintf("%d", CBigNum(vch).getint());
else
return HexStr(vch);
}
Which creates some ambiguity: it can output 1002003004 for both decimal number 1002003004 (which fits in 4-byte int) and for hex representation of 5-byte data 10 02 00 30 04.
Is it okay? Do we have some other non-ambiguous encoding of data? I don't see any string parser in BitcoinQT, so maybe it's a non-issue, but bitcoin-ruby has a parser. In case of bitcoin-ruby, it only parses 2, 3, ... 16 as OP_<n>, while 17 would be parsed as 0x17==23. And data 0x16 (==22) would be encoded as "16" and then interpreted as 0x10 (== 16).
In CoreBitcoin (objc implementation) I'd like to avoid ambiguity and be able to correctly parse human-readable scripts.
