Library Suggestion: JSON Parser

[noahgibbs]

(Writing this here tentatively. If people think this is the wrong place for library feature requests I'll remove it - maybe to the SkotOS repo?)

SkotOS has XML support under skoot/usr/XML and skoot/usr/DTD. There are a number of cases where it would be more useful for human file authors to be able to write in JSON -- it's a much more popular format now than when SkotOS was created, and it's already part of the SkotOS ecosystem in places like thin-auth and Orchil.

A JSON parser/emitter, like the XML parser/emitter, would be really useful. It's not as clear that we need DTDs yet -- the JSON parser/emitter would definitely be useful without them.

I think JSON would be fantastic for settings - right now we have things like the instance file and the userdb file where the parsers are just not very good. The instance file's is so bad that it will pretty clearly get us into trouble before long. You couldn't add comments to it because a valid settings line in a comment would be accepted as real!

However, DGD has some unusual characteristics and adding JSON support isn't as easy in DGD as it would be in a language with simpler callout to system libraries. So somebody would need to actually write the JSON parser. Probably best to write it in a non-SkotOS-specific way.