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Comment by emodendroket | Hacker News Reader

Sure, that would be fine. They could also use a totally wacky format, I don't care. The problem is that without a standard the JSON tools in different languages don't all agree on how to serialize dates and you end up needing to deserialize/serialize manually the smooth over the differences. The problem isn't that you can't represent dates; it's that there is no standard way to do it.

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> The problem isn't that you can't represent dates; it's that there is no standard way to do it.

ISO 8601?

That is a string. Not date.

That's not "standard." That's one of many ways that people represent dates in JSON, because the JSON specification itself does not mandate that you use any particular representation. If you use it there is no guarantee it will be recognized as a date on the other end.

What black hole are you sending JSON into where the only way they could know something is a date is if you use a date type? Why can't that be part of the data structure you agreed upon in order to communicate in the first place?

Even if there is an agreed on schema, parsers can generate native Date objects on the recipient if there is a date type. When you deserialize a nested graph of objects, it's hard to convert each date to an actual date if what you get is just a string. Makes it a lot easier during integration.

Why am I hand-writing code to supplement the parser? I mean, hell, we don't need JSON at all, why don't I just invent my own serialization format and write parsers for it in each environment I want to use it in.

Well, it'd need to cover dates, times with time zones, date times with time zones, times without time zones, date times without time zones. Seems better pegged to the data source without thinking it out clearly.

So? It's not like this is a complex problem nobody knows how to solve.

Agreed! But it's not so simple to just add a "date" type; it would add significant complexity to a relatively simple text format.

Yeah, I guess, but everyone ends up implementing it anyway; the problem is they all do it in an idiosyncratic way (and one that is ambiguous... after all, maybe I really wanted that to be a string).

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