Comment by zzo38computer

3 days ago

> What do you mean under "syntax typing" and complications in the syntax?

This question has been answered by someone else, but I have my own comments about this as well so I will write it also.

EDN does complicate the syntax (so does XML, TER, various extensions of JSON, etc), but DER (and SDSER, if you want streaming) avoids this problem because the framing is the same for all data types, even though it has many different types and the encoding of the values of each type.

> That [the whole world seems to run on JSON] is true, and I don't like that :)

I agree with you (well, not everything but too many things); I don't like that either.

> From my perspective JSON syntax is too "light" and that translates to many complications typically in the form of convention

I agree with you about that too. In this case it is a number (there are problems with the numeric types in JSON), but there is also such things as: octet strings, date/time, non-Unicode text, etc.

> I agree JSON’s number types are weak; it’s been a source of real problems for me. Given that observation, you can go in two directions: have richer types, like EDN, or give up on types in JSON entirely, which is the alternative I’d propose.

Not only the number type (which is floating point so there is not a proper 64-bit or larger integer type, even though a integer type has been added into JavaScript after JSON was invented); the string type is also weak (since it cannot be arbitrary bytes), and so is the key/value list type (keys are only allowed to be strings and cannot be other types).

There are other directions as well; I think DER does in between because of the same framing for all types even though there are many types (you do not have to use all of the types; it seems that some people don't like it apparently due to the expectation that you have to use all of the types, but that is wrong). (DER also has the advantage of the canonical form if you need it (DER is already canonical form); although there is a canonical form for JSON, it is a bit messy, and apparently the canonical form for numbers in JSON is complicated.)