Hacker News Reader

Comment by skybrian | Hacker News Reader

VS Code uses JSON with comments for config files. [1]

Technically, this is not JSON. You won't be able to use a standard JSON parser without stripping comments first. But you can use a simple, JSON-like language with comments for config.

[1] https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/languages/json#_json-with...

View on HN

> you can use a simple, JSON-like language with comments for config.

YAML can be employed as a simple JSON-like language with comments.

> simple

YAML is much, much more complicated than JSON.

    > simple
    YAML is much, much more complicated than JSON.

Quoting a single word from the parent’s sentence is misleading. The sentence "YAML can be employed as a simple JSON-like language with comments." is true because JSON is YAML, so you can parse a JSON file with #-comments using a YAML parser.

The parser is not simple, though, and that's what counts.

Most YAML users don't need to look at the source for a YAML parser. I appreciate elegant simplicity, but I don't think parser complexity is the most important metric by which to judge a data interchange format.

If you use a YAML parser to parse JSON-with-comments, it will accept many inputs that don't correspond to JSON-with-comments, and furthermore is likely to report syntax errors that don't make sense to a user who only knows JSON.

So, this unnecessary parser complexity is a usability issue. You should use a parser for the config language you actually intend to support.

JSON5 is also a great alternative: https://json5.org/

Supports comments, trailing commas, single quotes, multi-line strings, and more number formats.

I really wished json5 would support optional commas as well. If you have a new line, no comma needed. So you can do

[

]

New lines used by humans, computers should do a good job as well.

That's not a subset of JavaScript though.

It looks very like an s-expression. Maybe we should go back to Lisp for our data encoding? (and to our code when we are at it? ;))

Like https://hjson.org/?

Well you could use CSON, which uses CoffeeScript notation that allows for constructs such as:

required: [

  'firstName'

  'lastName'

]

which is the same as:

{

  "required": [

    "firstName",

    "lastName"

  ]

}

in JSON :)

Sublime Text does too.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com