Re: [Json] Proposal: the minimal edit

[John Cowan <[e-mail]>]

Tim Bray scripsit:

> I just can’t bring myself to see it that way.  Any reasonable person would
> read this statement in the introduction and conclude that a string is, you
> know, a sequence of Unicode characters.  The fact that the ABNF later on
> contradicts this does not “supplement” the introduction, it’s just a
> spec-drafting goof.  

Except that we know, from postings to this list and other lists, that
the author's intent was to be able to exchange arbitrary code points.
The goof, if any, was in the introduction, and consisted in the failure
to define "Unicode character" in the ECMAScript rather than the Unicode
sense.  If read in connection with the ECMAScript 3 definition of
"string value", all is clear:

# 4.3.16 String Value
# 
# A string value is a member of the type String and is a finite ordered
# sequence of zero or more 16-bit unsigned integer values.
# 
# NOTE
# 
# Although each value usually represents a single 16-bit unit of UTF-16
# text, the language does not place any restrictions or requirements on
# the values except that they be 16-bit unsigned integers.

Now it's true that authorial intent cannot dictate the meaning of a spec,
and it's also true that allowing the interchange of unescaped surrogate
code points is bad, because there is no reliable way to encode them.
Those are among the reasons why we are here, I hope.

-- 
John Cowan                                <[e-mail]>
Yakka foob mog.  Grug pubbawup zink wattoom gazork.  Chumble spuzz.
    --Calvin, giving Newton's First Law "in his own words"