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Fixing JSON

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139 points robin_reala | 1 comments | 20 Aug 16 18:08 UTC | HN request time: 0.293s | source
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greenyoda ◴[20 Aug 16 18:17 UTC] No.12327716[source]▶
I never understood why the double quotes around property names are mandatory. For example, in JavaScript, I can write

    { foo: 1, bar: 2 }
but JSON syntax insists on

    { "foo": 1, "bar": 2 }
This makes JSON less easily readable by humans, and harder to write or edit by hand.

Anyone know why JSON was designed this way?

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1. jerluc ◴[20 Aug 16 18:31 UTC] No.12327762[source]▶
I'm no expert, but I'd imagine fully dropping the quotes wouldn't allow you to use the same syntax as a map/dictionary in Javascript, whereby the keys could be [almost] any type, and string keys could contain characters such as - or even : which otherwise would prove ambiguous to a Javascript parser.