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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: 0.341s | source
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_greim_ ◴[20 Aug 16 18:35 UTC] No.12327784[source]▶
With the exception of trailing commas, all these things would break the fact that JSON is a subset of JavaScript. Breaking that would cause a lot more problems than it solves. It's just that the minor problems you have to live with seem worse than the major problems you don't.
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wtetzner ◴[20 Aug 16 18:38 UTC] No.12327801[source]▶
What value is there in having JSON be a subset of JavaScript? In fact, it would be a good idea to make it not be a subset of JS, because that would prevent people from evaling it.
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captainmuon ◴[20 Aug 16 19:03 UTC] No.12327894[source]▶
It's also (almost) a subset of Python, and possibly other languages. The benefit is that it is trivial to remember, because you already know the syntax. And you can not just eval it (which you if course shouldn't do if you didn't write the JSON yourself), but more important you can just copy it into your code. Or start with a object literal in code, and when it grows, or you want to use real-world data, switch to an external data source.

There are a couple of projects which extend JSON. I believe an ideal JSON superset would be compatible with ECMAScript 6 object literals, and have comments and trailing commas.

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1. amyjess ◴[20 Aug 16 20:50 UTC] No.12328263[source]▶
> It's also (almost) a subset of Python

Yes, one of my main uses of JSON in my personal projects (and at one of my previous companies) is to serialize a Python dict to disk or network (and to read a Python dict from disk or network, of course). If I keep the members to int/float/str/dict/list, it works beautifully, and if I need to serialize anything more complex, I can always use jsonpickle.