Re: [Cbor] Tag 279 "Map entries for CBOR" in array format

(Note that I just accepted a PR from Carsten, so the text has changed ever so slightly)

The main reason I want a type like this isn't to persevere order, but to round-trip Map instances from JavaScript, through CBOR, and back to JavaScript.  I want to ensure that they end up a Map again, even if they have all-string keys.  Node-cbor currently uses a JS Object if all of the keys are strings, and falls back to a Map if it detects anything other than a string.  Another choice would have been to always coerce CBOR map keys into strings, but that is a little difficult to do in a non-surprising way with structured keys.

That said, order doesn't hurt my use case, and if someone else wants that, great.

More comments, questions and pull requests welcome.

— 
Joe Hildebrand

> On Feb 17, 2021, at 8:58 PM, Dale R. Worley <worley@ariadne.com> wrote:
> 
> A recent message pointed to:
> 
>> https://github.com/hildjj/cbor-map-entries 
> 
> I found it an odd read, as I couldn't figure out what the point is.  As
> written, it's an alternative way to express maps, as a tag applied to an
> array containing keys and values.  But what's the point?
> 
> The text starts off with "Although CBOR has support for generic Maps
> (Major Type 5), some implementation languages (such as ECMAScript) have
> two different types they might use to hold the information, depending on
> whether all of the keys are strings or not."  And it makes sense that's
> a problem to be solved.  But this document doesn't solve that, in that
> neither tag-279-array nor CBOR map are constrained to have the keys be
> strings, so both of them would have to be decoded into a more general
> data type/structure.
> 
> Maybe I'm not read into CBOR enough to understand what is intended.  But
> it seems to me that this document probably intended to specify that the
> key values in a type-279-array must be strings.
> 
> Dale
> 
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