Support for parsing back into numbers

[tysonzero]

I was curious how feasible parsing from these various forms back into numbers would be, and how much interest there was in such functionality.

[roelvandijk]

That would both be very nice to have and very hard to implement.

Ideally you would have a single specification from which we can both parse numbers and pretty print number forms.

This idea exists. A package like roundtrip implements this idea for (de)serialization. It is based on this paper by Tillmann Rendel and Klaus Ostermann.

[tysonzero]

That does sound pretty ideal! Has any further work gone into this single spec approach since roundtrip, since it seems to not be actively developed any more.