alt Hacker NewsHow do you represent a leading 0?
I don't know enough about phone numbers to say whether you could encode them as an int anyway. In the UK all standard numbers start 0 and international codes start 00? Of course you could introduce a 'locale' and then 20 years later try to solve that mess with multiple ways of representing international numbers. Or maybe not teach young programmers that you can make the phone number a numeric field?
So it seems to me the solution is to save them as BCD...
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I think you and and your parent are in agreement, you CAN do something, but it's not useful, and then you have to either by convention or additional fields deal with the leading zeros and other non-numeric aspects of phone numbers.
I would also teach young programmers (about data) with the shorthand used above, things like "Do you want to add phone numbers? Multiply them? Utilize fractional components? Why are we storing these as numbers?"
Encode every 0 as 10 - then decode every 10 back to 0. Or more efficiently, the first 0 as 10, then decode the the first 10 as 0.
In addition to digits, conventions for phone numbers include the plus sign (international prefix), comma (dial pause), dashes or parentheses (zone/area codes), and spaces (logical separation). I don't see why you'd want to burden yourself with having to regenerate a locally-correct phone number representation each time it needs to be displayed to the user.