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Comment by quotemstr | Hacker News Reader

YAML and TOML wouldn't have been necessary if JSON had been slightly more expressive. If JSON had

  * comments
  * bareword (not double quoted) object key names

it'd be a much more suitable configuration file format for everything, and I don't think we'd see the motivation to make things like TOML and YAML.

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JSON5 pretty much addresses all the problems with JSON as a config format. I'd love for it to just replace JSON entirely.

https://json5.org/

Generally looks good, but ugh, I dislike allowing single quotes. Allowing single quotes has close to zero ergonomic value but increases the number of ways to write the same fundamental thing.

But that's a minor quibble. If everyone adopted this thing instead of legacy JSON, we'd be better-off.

Having two ways to quote is a useful feature, not just one way to do the same thing.

Javascript already has this, so allowing single quotes simplifies copypasting object literals, which is a common use case.

That looks really nice. I might start using it for configuration.

YAML and JSON are about the same age: YAML dates from 2001 and JSON 2001/2.

Yep. And trailing commas,

or also no commas at all

I never realized I would want this so much.

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