On: JSON5 – JSON for Humans

[The_Colonel]

> Well what's more readable, .8675309 that is understood to have an implicit zero

Is it universally understood? I think it's a US / English thing. In my country I've never seen numbers written in this way and many people would not "parse" it mentally as 0.8675309

[The_Colonel → efitz]

What an extreme reaction. Many people would not be able to parse it since they've never seen a number written in this way, but you immediately write them off as assholes. Wow.

[efitz → The_Colonel]

It will look funny to many people but they will be able to interpret it. Remember that this thread is in the context of whether to be strict or relaxed in a specific file syntax for files intended to be authored by humans.

[The_Colonel → efitz]

> It will look funny to many people but they will be able to interpret it.

You're still approaching this with the background knowledge of what this is. If you've never seen this, you can only guess, and there are a couple of options.

I've been terminally online for the better part of the last 2 decades, yet I've seen this way of writing for the first time only ~5 year ago or so, and I still remember simply not knowing what it is. The first reaction is that it's simply a typo - the author mistyped - the dot should have been a digit or perhaps not be there at all.

[layer8 → efitz]

For people who grew up in countries where comma is the decimal separator (and dot the thousands grouping separator), this is highly unintuitive, because it would seem much more likely to be a misplaced punctuation mark.

It might be moderately intuitive to English native speakers because of oral usage like “point one three eight”, but that’s also not a thing in many other languages.

[szszrk → efitz]

Stripping zero is not a common practice. You are clearly speaking of your own bubble here.

For most of the world that is even more ridiculous than using dot as decimal space separator or writing dates with month not in the middle place.

Even Americans I work with don't write it like that when doing quick draft discussion, as they know it's confusing to others.

[efitz → szszrk]

It’s not about whether people normally write it that way. In the overall context of the thread it’s whether they ever write it that way.

[szszrk → efitz]

From my perspective no one does. Ever.

I only know it's a thing because I watched some math-related edu shows. Didn't even see that when I briefly worked in US.

[oneeyedpigeon → szszrk]

> even more ridiculous than ... writing dates with month not in the middle place

Come on, let's be fair—nothing else will ever be as ridiculous as that!

[szszrk → oneeyedpigeon]

I could maybe throw into the contest:

- "a gallon". Not purely US thing but almost. It can be anything from 3.8 to 4.4 liters, depending mostly on what are you measuring.

- writing digits. Is it "1", is it "7", is it "i", is it "l"? Why do it to yourself, while their printed fonts are pretty much the same as everywhere else...