On Mon, Sep 13, 2010 at 11:26:28AM -0400, Joshua Boyd wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 03, 2010 at 09:08:25PM -0700, Andrew Poelstra wrote:
> > XML is far too heavy, agreed, and it's signal-to-noise ratio is abysmal.
> > I think that using a Lisp (or Lispy-looking) format would be extensible,
> > easy to parse, and make the most people happy.
>
> Allow me to toss out JSON. It is about as light weight as using S-EXP,
> but politically it isn't tied down by references to Lisp. Plus, since
> it has become fairly popular, there are good readers/writers for most
> languages.
>
> The format is defined at: http://www.json.org/
>
> Basically you are allowed strings, numbers, arrays, and "object", which
> would be called a map, an associative array, a dictionary, or something
> else along those lines anywhere else.
>
The problem I have with JSON (and to some extent, Lisp) is that it is
not self-documenting. You can't open a JSON document and immediately
see what everything is and what it does; it just looks like gibberish
and brackets.
Also, it doesn't require a consistent newline scheme.