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Comment by jmcdonald-ut | Hacker News Reader

I'm sure there are counter points to what I'm about to bring up, but three observations:

1. In my experience JSON is frequently output programmatically, and taken in programmatically. Comments are not useful in these cases.

2. The only time comments could be perceived as useful then would be when parsing JSON by eye or hand. However, it is not difficult to parse JSON and understand it unless the keys have used obfuscated names. If key naming is obfuscated, comments aren't really the correct solution.

3. "An object is an unordered set of name/value pairs", as mentioned by jasonlotito and others earlier. There is no guarantee that a JSON parser will give you the right value if there are two of the same keys in the same scope.

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> There is no guarantee that a JSON parser will give you the right value if there are two of the same keys in the same scope.

In fact, reading the RFC:

> The names within an object SHOULD be unique.

I'm pretty sure an implementation could refuse to parse the form altogether.

SHOULD is a horrible word to put in any spec if it doesn't specify what the result will be if that recommendation is violated

SHOULD is defined in RFC 2119 as

    3. SHOULD   This word, or the adjective "RECOMMENDED", mean that there
       may exist valid reasons in particular circumstances to ignore a
       particular item, but the full implications must be understood and
       carefully weighed before choosing a different course.

The consequences are undefined, I feel, for a reason. You can't put them all down on paper, it depends on what all the parsers do. The parsers can accept or reject things with duplicate keys, or they can play a nice little ditty through the speakers.

All it means is a parser isn't required to reject JSON with multiple keys. It can, however, do whatever the fuck it wants with them.

If the wording was precise, then it should be a MUST. SHOULD indicates a terrible world of unknown consequences.

Re: #1

I know there is a lot of JSON handling that happens behind-the-scenes, but there is also a non-trivial amount of JSON that I have manually created and/or altered, and have to share with a team.

It's a blessing and a curse, these modern NodeJS projects -- it's awesome that I can simply create/modify a .json file with a few properties, run a command, and magic happens. However, if I want to try and communicate out the intent of the values to my team of 20+, it becomes really convoluted. The projects all magically work by looking for foo.json, but if I comment that file then it breaks.

So I have to create another foo.comments.json, add another script that will remove the comments and then call the original instructions. Then I need to create additional documentation instructing the team to ignore the developer's docs regarding native use, and to run the application with our own homebrew setup.

It also can make testing a pain in the ass, because now I can no longer comment out values, I have to remove them completely. Not a huge deal, annoying nonetheless.

Why not adding an object field with identifier a_comment:"blabla..."

The advantage I see in this way of commenting is that the comment becomes accessible inside the program instead of being stripped off by the parser. For the human reader it's also more obvious.

Unfortunately, it's not possible to add comment to anything else than objects. But the OP's proposal as well.

Why have comments in code at all, then? You could always just make a variable/constant, with the added benefit that the comment becomes accessible inside the program...

But that makes no sense at all to me. I agree that using comments as metadata/directives is typically an antipattern hack, but what about for non-metadata comments? Embedding comments into code is just as ass-backwards as embedding code into comments. Neither is right.

> For the human reader it's also more obvious.

Strongly disagree here -- if I open a file that I've never worked in before, I have faith that the comments were meant specifically for me. Likewise, I assume all code in the file is not for me (on account that I'm not a compiler/interpreter/etc.).

Right, we're suffering from people using JSON for config files just like a few years back a lot of projects suffered from using YAML for config files (though YAML was at least designed to be human editable ... ingy and I regularly disagree over whether he succeeded :).

For the past few years, I've generally been using either apache-style via http://p3rl.org/Config::General or some sort of INI derivative (git is proof that ini is good enough for a lot more things than you might expect).

For the future, ingy and I have been working on http://p3rl.org/JSONY which is basically "JSON, but with almost all of the punctuation optional where that doesn't introduce ambiguity" - currently there are perl and ruby parsers for it, javascript will hopefully be next.

Admittedly, we -haven't- got round to defining a format for comments yet, but my point is more "JSON wasn't really designed for that, let's think about something better".

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