The problem with that is not only would it break old code, but the neat little trick of JSON being directly embeddable would break. And who would want that.
Edit: I forgot that “true”, “false”, and “null” don’t exist in Python. Not the hardest thing to fix by declaring some local variables, but at that point you’re doing too much and should use a library.
Edit 2: added quotes around the keywords to disambiguate them from the general concepts
JSON (or any data format) being directly embeddable sounds nice in theory, but isn't really a great idea in practice.
JSON was originally intended to be loaded via eval. This was exploited almost immediately, which is why JS got proper JSON parsing and serialization functions. You should always run JSON (and any other serialized format) through a proper parser to load it. If you're clever, you can do this at build time, but you should never rely on any data file being valid at runtime.
Well yes. I know. I think of Python’s syntax being mostly compatible with JSON as a
> neat little trick.
I actually forgot that eval() was a thing when I wrote that comment.
What I meant was, you could copy and paste your own JSON into your source code for a simple payload in a throwaway script, for whatever you may need it for.
Edit: Reddit mobile app doesn’t want to make that a block quote. You get the idea though.
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u/carcigenicate 2d ago
{/}is being proposed so sets have an empty literal.