[design decision] Support comments or not

[josdejong]

One very common complaint about JSON is that it doesn't support comments. Comments are particulary handy in configuration files. Tabular-JSON is not aiming to be used for configuration files, but since comments are quite easy to support and are a main complaint of JSON, it may be worth supporting them in Tabular-JSON.

In general, there are two types of comments:

// single line comments

/* multi
     line
       comments */

Before deciding on this, it will be good to do an experiment, implementing support for comments in a separate branch to see how this impacts the specification and implementation of a parser.

Complexity: Low
Added value: Medium

[gwhitney]

I strongly recommend allowing comments. You never know what a new format will ultimately be used for, and as Tabular-JSON is a human-sensible format, comment will always be helpful

[josdejong]

Thanks for your input Glen. You're right: the same holds for JSON itself, which is a data format but is often used as configuration format.

[gwhitney]

Yes, and the lack of comments is perpetually frustrating in projects that use JSON for configuration. In fact, that's why I submitted comment-handling code to pnpm for the case in which the package file is provided in JSON5 format, which does allow comments.

[josdejong]

😂 Comment noted.

I didn't know you where involved in getting comments working in pnpm, nice!