Ben Coman wrote:
Sven Van Caekenberghe wrote: The human readability is a strong point of JSON & STON, but is there any requirement for "human edit-ability" by which I mean in a text editor? In which case the referencing objects by counting "OrderedCollection [ Point [1, 2], @2, @2 ]" would be fragile, since insertion of an object via text editor would offset all references. Something like "OrderedCollection@1 [ Point@2 [1, 2], @2, @2 ]" would be more robust. However if you expect to never need to edit the STON file in a text editor, this point is mute.
Shouldn't relative numbering help here? Not a bulletproof solution, but for simple changes, it suffices.
The downside of this idea is a bit more cluttered look. However I notice that evaluating #123 in Workspace returns an integer rather than a ByteSymbol. So it would seem that #123 would never be written out in STON format (from Pharo), which means "OrderedCollection#1 [ Point#2 [1, 2], #2, #2 ]" might be a less cluttered option, or perhaps a mix like "OrderedCollection#1 [ Point#2 [1, 2], @2, @2 ]" doesn't detract too much from readability. Actually I think this enhances readability anyhow, since if there are a lot of object references in the STON file, in a text viewer I would have to need to manually count them to follow the references. cheers -ben
Herby
