in JSON, Why is each name quoted?
The JSON spec says that JSON is an object or an array. In the case of an object,
An object structure is represented as a pair of curly brackets surrounding zero or more name/value pairs (or members). A name is a string. ...
And later, the spec says that a string is surrounded in quotes.
Why?
Thus,
{"Property1":"Value1","Property2":18}
and not
{Property1:"Value1",Property2:18}
Question 1 : why not allow the name in the name/value pairs to be unquoted identifiers?
Question 2 : Is there a semantic difference between the two representations above, when evaluated in Javascript?
Question 1: why not allow the name in the name/value pairs to be unquoted identifiers?
The design philosophy of JSON is "Keep it simple"
"Quote names with " " is a lot simpler than "You may quote names with " or ' but you don't have to, unless they contain certain characters (or combinations of characters that would make it a keyword) and ' or " may need to be quoted depending on what delimiter you selected".
Question 2: Is there a semantic difference between the two representations above, when evaluated in Javascript?
No. In JavaScript they are identical.
I leave a quote from a presentation that Douglas Crockford (the creator of the JSON standard) gave to Yahoo.
He talks about how he discovered JSON, and amongst other things why he decided to use quoted keys:
.... That was when we discovered the unquoted name problem. It turns out ECMA Script 3 has a whack reserved word policy. Reserved words must be quoted in the key position, which is really a nuisance. When I got around to formulizing this into a standard, I didn't want to have to put all of the reserved words in the standard, because it would look really stupid.
At the time, I was trying to convince people: yeah, you can write applications in JavaScript, it's actually going to work and it's a good language. I didn't want to say, then, at the same time: and look at this really stupid thing they did! So I decided, instead, let's just quote the keys.
That way, we don't have to tell anybody about how whack it is.
That's why, to this day, keys are quoted in JSON.
You can find the complete video and transcript here.
Both : and whitespace are permitted in identifiers. Without the quotes, this would cause ambiguity when trying to determine what exactly constitutes the identifier.
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