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Comment by draegtun | Hacker News Reader

It's worth looking at Rebol [1], a language that is also homoiconic which was influenced by Lisp, Forth, Self & Logo and had a big influence on JSON too!

  user: [name: "John Doe" birth-date: 1970-01-01 account-balance: $1000.01]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebol

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> had a big influence on JSON too!

It might have influenced Javascript, but the entire idea in JSON is to have a data exchange syntax that can be plonked into Javascript as a literal. That requirement leaves room for no other influence, pretty much.

Here's a video where Crockford mentions Rebol (and others) being an influence on JSON - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-C-JoyNuQJs&t=1233s

I've seen it mentioned on Rebol chatter that Crockford approached Carl Sassenrath (creator of Rebol) to open-source & use Rebol prior to creating JSON. So having a Javascript literal wasn't on Crockford's mind at that point.

NB. Rebol was closed sourced until 2012.

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