[Json] JSON by example

[John Cowan <[e-mail]>]

Phillip Hallam-Baker scripsit:

> 'Wirthless'

"You may call me by value, and call me 'Worth', or you may call me by
name, and call me 'Veert'."  --Wirth on how to say his name.

> Yes, real numbers and integers are probably things you want to be able
> to treat differently in code because it is very very rare to need or
> want a real64 number in a protocol.

Okay, an integer encodes the type "JSON number which is an integer",
and a non-integer encodes the type "JSON number".  Note that this might
be represented as a Java BigDecimal or equivalent.

> But I think that you absolutely want to be able to put binary blobs of
> data in a stream and distinguish them from strings.

Good idea.  If the string is "deadbeef", it encodes the type of binary
blobs represented in JSON as a string. :-)

> That is an interesting one because it comes down to how do you want
> extensibility to work. In particular, when do you want adding things
> to be backwards compatible and when do you want to cause things to
> halt rather than have an application try to act on data it did not
> fully understand?

I think you want to be able to choose, but I'm not sure how to represent
it within the JSON-by-example format.  The obvious way is to reserve a
key like "...", but I haven't wanted to do that.

> This is actually a little problematic as in JSON any slot can hold
> null while many languages don't allow integers or booleans to be null.

True.  We can say then that null is always permitted wherever the schema
allows an array or object.

-- 
John Cowan          http://www.ccil.org/~cowan        [e-mail]
How they ever reached any conclusion at all is starkly unknowable
to the human mind.        --"Backstage Lensman", Randall Garrett