Which is pretty much what a specification is.
It's one or more people saying "This is how things are if you call them X".
> presumptuous
Presumptuous? It was in response to the feature being abused!
> "punish everyone in the classroom because one child misbehaves" mentality
No more than creating laws is. A significant subset of the population are misusing it in such a way as could cause widespread damage. It is a minor inconvenience to the 'law abiding people' (particularly given than any comments would be removed if read in and spat out by any program). There are workarounds ("field_comment":"some comment") or if that's not enough, use another format. Use one that allows comments, there are many.
> Don't tell me I can do a silly thing like redefine a field, as if it's "neat". It's an abomination that I have to resort to such things
It's also completely unreliable, it's a terrible solution and nobody should use it. I think we're fully in agreement here.
> And guess what: by resorting to such things I can still do precisely what Crockford claims he was trying to prevent. So his rationale is not only insulting to one's intelligence, it's sheer stupidity.
No you can't. The point was to stop people adding pre-processing commands or other such things to json, which would be in random formats and invisible to some parsers (as comments should be), visible and important to others. You don't want to pass a valid piece of JSON through a parser and end up with two different outcomes dependent on something in a comment, do you? Or have to use parser X or Z because Y doesn't understand directive A, but it does understand directive B and C, and while Z understands C, and X knows B, Z doesn't, so I have to use the version from a pull request from DrPotato which I think supports...
What I'm saying is that there is a benefit in simple standards.
