For those interested, the problem was with the string "08". At least at the time, the pyYAML generator I was using would render it as 08 (without quotes), which is not parsable as a number because the leading 0 indicates the number is in octal, but 8 isn't a valid octal digit. Since it wasn't parsable as a number, it should default to being treated as a string. However the golang parser disagreed and instead raised an error because "8" was not a valid octal digit.