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LSON: Lucid Serialized Object Notation

If I had a dime for every developer who thought of creating a better JSON…

About

The JSON file format is beautiful in its simplicity and power. With a surprisingly succinct syntax, it is able to express data in a huge variety of formats. Yet there are little annoyances of the format: the lack of comments, mandated string quoting, mandated key quoting, double quotes only, strict syntax for commas, limitations in numeric values, and so forth.

LSON was a personal doodle in my spare time to see how I'd like to see the format evolve. In the beginning, I made all the standard tweaks. However, in working and re-working it, I encountered ideas that I found to be quite powerful, and ideas building from those. In the end, I arrived at a format that I believe keeps the ultimate simplicity of the file format, with greater power and expressiveness.

Here's a list of some of LSON's more interesting features:

  1. It's intended to be both concise and readable by humans as well as computers. It supports comments. Items are optionally terminated by whitespace, end delimiters, commas or semi-colons.

  2. It does not aim to mirror JavaScript, and thus is not a JavaScript subset. At the same time, LSON is a superset of JSON: any legal JSON file is legal LSON.

  3. LSON focuses on data representation, not data usage. With the single exception of string values, there is no intrinsic support for numbers, boolean, or any other primitive type.

  4. LSON supports arbitrary elements: domain-specific data values with declared or unknown type. Elements provide first-class support for domain-specific values such as true, null, infinity, 2018-07-02, #6b17ec, (x,a,b) => { a <= x && x <= b }, and so forth. LSON encoders and decoders handle both known and unknown types in a consistent and predictable manner.

  5. LSON adds two new data structures to JSON's array and dictionary: table and graph.

You can browse the examples for a quick scan of what LSON looks like.

LSON Tools

I am just starting on an LSON parser and command-line utility in C++. Ultimately this will fork into an LSON C++ library, and one or several standalone LSON command-line utilities. You can find this in the src directory.

In addition, Connor Hollasch has written a Java library for an early version of LSON.

Building

This project uses the CMake build tool. CMake is a meta-build system that locates and uses your local development tools to build the project if possible.

To build, first install CMake. Then go to the project root directory and run the following command:

cmake -B build

This will locate your installed development tools and configure your project build in the build/ directory. After that, whenever you want a new build, run this command:

cmake --build build

This will build a debug version of the project, located in build/Debug/. To build a release version, run

cmake --build build --config release

You can find the built release executable in build/Release/.