On JSON and REBOL

I am reminded of a Native American comedian who had a routine, in which he was describing what he would do if he got caught taking a car. "I didn't steal it, officer. I discovered it." :-)

If you listen to what Douglas says, he does say it's more a "discovery" than an "invention". It was a pattern he'd seen in a few places, and he realized the need for its standardization. In his view, Rebol was a strong influence on that mindset. Hence he credits it in that view, and he feels people should take a look at what the language has to offer.

Prior to the open sourcing in December I was an outspoken critic of Rebol's proprietary nature...but since my demands were met, I now feel comfortable advocating it. (And I do so on a semi-daily basis.) Please do feel free to come chat with us and RebolBot:

http://chat.stackoverflow.com/rooms/291/rebol-and-red

Literal notation utilised by JSON was indeed a part of Javascript, however JSON was a subset of Javascript specifically selected for cross-language messaging; by necessity pruning the parts of literal Javascript unsuited for this purpose and in part conforming to identical literals in other languages (see http://www.json.org/fatfree.html). It's unclear how without the limits set by the JSON spec that literal Javascript would have become a popular exchange format.

It took Crockford's Rebol-influenced eye to spot the potential for a minimalist though somewhat expressive exchange format based on elementary block structures, and near-genius to carve it out of the spartan confines of the Javascript syntactic swamps. Sadly not being Rebol, JSON does not include words (see 'Reserved Words' http://javascript.crockford.com/survey.html), dates, urls, email addresses (see http://www.rebol.com/rebolsteps.html); and will forever be burdened with comma-delimiters.