On 09 Dec 2013, at 05:10, Martin J. Dürst <[email protected]> wrote:
> In the original text, neither are these two usages disambiguated, nor is > there any explanation about where the "10" is coming from or how it has to be > used. I think this is symptomatic of a larger problem that we occasionally fall for when writing specs. ECMA-404 appears to be a textbook example of a “trapdoor spec” — if you already know what it is supposed to say, then it reads fine, but if you approach it as a fresh spec, it is undecipherable, as it relies on tacit knowledge to connect the dots. Now in this case that may not be as big a problem because everybody already does know what JSON is*). I’m still not thrilled to use it as a normative reference. More importantly, reducing JSON to its surface syntax, and removing a few points about the data model (even though much of it remains in the form of allusions) opens the door to forking the data model. This will allow all kinds of cool things to be done by repurposing the JSON syntax, but will damage the JSON ecosystem that is built around that data model. One wonders whether that is the point. Grüße, Carsten *) Here specifically, we all know how to write numbers in programming languages, and (as long as you don’t address the hard problems like exactness) the idiosyncratic syntax details (decimal only, no leading zeroes on mantissa, no plus, but leading zeroes or plus are allowed on the exponent, E can be upper or lower case) are all that is needed to detail this spec, even though there is much more to actual interoperability. Few implementers will get the semantics wrong from that skimpy spec. _______________________________________________ es-discuss mailing list [email protected] https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/es-discuss
