They were chucked out because, according to the guy who defined it, people started using them for parsing directives, which hurt interoperability because now you needed to be sure that the parser would both read the comments and interpret them correctly. Suddenly, those comments might make otherwise identical files parse differently. If the whole point is that it’s reliable and machine-readable, keeping it to the minimal set of features and not extending it any way whatsoever is a good way to ensure compatibility.
What you can do is define some property for comments. It’s not standardised, but you could do stuff like
{"//":"This is a common marker for comments","#":"I've never seen that as a property name, so it might be safe?","_comment":"Property names with underscore for technical fields seem common enough as well, and it's semantically explicit about its purpose"}
I’m not a real programmer but I was wondering wtf you’re on about because I don’t think I’ve ever worked with a json file in a system that didn’t use // for comments lmfao
No biggie, I just named an example. Even “real” programmers, whatever definition you want to use for that, don’t know all languages.
But yes, many languages do use // as comments and particularly the Javascript environment it originally stems from does. Python (#) and SQL (--) are the only examples I interact with frequently enough to know off the top of my head (but SQL still recognises /* ... */ for delimited comments). XML/HTML also has <!-- --> for comments, but that’s not so much a programming and more of a description language.
They were chucked out because, according to the guy who defined it, people started using them for parsing directives, which hurt interoperability because now you needed to be sure that the parser would both read the comments and interpret them correctly. Suddenly, those comments might make otherwise identical files parse differently. If the whole point is that it’s reliable and machine-readable, keeping it to the minimal set of features and not extending it any way whatsoever is a good way to ensure compatibility.
What you can do is define some property for comments. It’s not standardised, but you could do stuff like
{ "//": "This is a common marker for comments", "#": "I've never seen that as a property name, so it might be safe?", "_comment": "Property names with underscore for technical fields seem common enough as well, and it's semantically explicit about its purpose" }I’m not a real programmer but I was wondering wtf you’re on about because I don’t think I’ve ever worked with a json file in a system that didn’t use // for comments lmfao
Python, for example
I did say “I’m not a real programmer” heh 😮💨 I just thought // was standard for comments across all json files
No biggie, I just named an example. Even “real” programmers, whatever definition you want to use for that, don’t know all languages.
But yes, many languages do use // as comments and particularly the Javascript environment it originally stems from does. Python (
#) and SQL (--) are the only examples I interact with frequently enough to know off the top of my head (but SQL still recognises/* ... */for delimited comments). XML/HTML also has<!-- -->for comments, but that’s not so much a programming and more of a description language.