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Comment by pdonis | Hacker News Reader

> The benefit of standard numeric and boolean types is that different tools can exchange data in a well-understood way.

I don't think that's what this tool is for. This tool is for humans to read and edit data. That's a different use case from automated programs exchanging data, for which I agree you should be using standardized numeric and boolean data types and not making everything a string. But how that standardized data gets determined from data that humans enter should be up to the individual application.

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Agreed. Serialization is not really possible with this tool, due to the following:

> A key that requires quoting must not contain both single and double quote characters.

You can't really serialize user data with that restriction.

It is still useful for humans to have a well-understood way to input typed data.

If you make everything a string then the interpretation of "no" as boolean true or false is left to each tool, and there are even tools which have different interpretations of "yes/no" for each field.

What is the use of this then? Humans don’t need structured data to exchange information and if this is insufficient to communicate it to the machine then it won’t be a great human to machine format either.

> Humans don’t need structured data to exchange information

Maybe we don't need it, but it often helps.

Also, this data format isn't necessarily for humans to exchange data with other humans, but for humans to give data to applications in a format that's much easier for humans to use.

> if this is insufficient to communicate it to the machine

Not at all. Each specific application can easily parse this data format according to its own needs. What this data format doesn't specify is a single translation into application data that is the same for all applications. But applications don't need or want that, because they have different use cases.

I see. That makes sense. Now that I think about it maybe if its in front of some database or storage that only handles strings it would work well as well.

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