Encoding for "shortstring" typed data (SNIP-12)

[penovicp]

I want to draw attention to the approach taken with the shortstring encoding. It was implemented by reusing the existing felt encoding.

As a basic example, a provided value "hello" will be encoded as 0x68656c6c6f, this I believe to not be contentious. The part where I believe there might be issues with is the encoding of numerical strings, the existing felt encoding treats both numbers and numerical strings as the same value and such behaviour might be undesirable/unexpected for the shortstring type. As an example "2" will be encoded as 0x2 while someone coming from a Cairo background will probably assume it to be encoded as 0x32.

Added context: This issue is a copy of the issue noted in this PR comment.