this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2024
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Some data formats are easy for humans to read but difficult for computers to efficiently parse. Others, like packed binary data, are dead simple for computers to parse but borderline impossible for a human to read.
XML bucks this trend and bravely proves that data formats do not have to be one or the other by somehow managing to be bad at both.
Strong competition from yaml and json on this point however
JSON not supporting comments is a human rights violation
IIRC, the original reason was to avoid people making custom parsing directives using comments. Then people did shit like
"foo": "[!-- number=5 --]"
instead.I've written Go code; they were right to fear.
I wrote a powershell script to parse some json config to drive it's automation. I was delighted to discover the built-in powershell ConvertFrom-Json command accepts json with
//
comments as .jsonc files. So my config files get to be commented.I hope the programmer(s) who thought to include that find cash laying in the streets everyday and that they never lose socks in the dryer.
There is actually an extension to JSON: https://json5.org/
Unfortunately only very few tools support that.
Wouldn't go that far, but it's an annoyance for sure.