for that matter, just do:

{

  "comment":"this is a comment";
  "value": 45;

  "comment":"this is also a comment";
  "value2": 64;

  "comment":"we like overloading the comment field";
  "stringval":"but these stay the same";

}

Then the parser might fail, and rightly so. A comment lower down shows it failing in a simple parser in go: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6147478

Keys SHOULD be unique.

SHOULD != SHALL

And, no, this scheme doesn't break the go parser because there isn't a typeshift between the "comment" fields, they are all strings.

http://play.golang.org/p/bxcIIyAeph

Ah fair enough on the break, I was wrong there.

But if the spec says that keys SHOULD be unique, what's the behaviour when they aren't?

I would agree it's very hackey and probably not a good idea since the spec is liable to change. But I wouldn't be sad if the spec were changed to allow for this, or to allow for comments.

> I would agree it's very hackey and probably not a good idea since the spec is liable to change

Well it's not really about the spec changing, the spec doesn't have a defined behaviour for duplicate keys.

> But I wouldn't be sad if the spec were changed to allow for this, or to allow for comments.

I don't think duplicate keys should be allowed, but I've no strong feelings on comments. I don't think there's any real need for them though.

I'm biased, back in the BeOS -> Haiku days, I was wanting some sort of configuration textfile that would neatly be able to be parsed into a BArchive object (and presumably transmitted into a BMessage). XML was all the rage at the time, so I wrote for myself a sort of XML-ish format, but I never contributed it to the tree. I learned the problems with XMLs (should it be an attribute or an innerText?). I wanted something with a bracket notation, but JSON had not been discovered by crockford yet, if it had been I would have gotten more involved and tried to have it be adopted.

Why not? It's just a configuration file.