Re: Light weight support for JSON

[George Caswell]

On Wed, 2022-08-31 at 11:11 -0400, Chet Ramey wrote:
> On 8/29/22 2:03 PM, tetsujin@scope-eye.net wrote:
> 
> > It would also help
> > greatly if the shell could internally handle hierarchical data in
> > variables.
> 
> That's a fundamental change. There would have to be a better reason
> to make
> it than handling JSON.

My contention is not that hierarchical variables should be added just
for the sake of supporting JSON.

My contention is that handling a format like JSON is, in principle, a
very easy problem that the shell should be well-equipped to handle;
that the proper way to add functionality to a shell, when possible, is
to delegate that to another program, but that writing such a program is
made significantly more difficult by the shell's near-inability to
communicate or store hierarchical data.

That, to me, is the case for both features, providing hierarchical
variables and JSON (or a different format with comparable
capabilities), within the shell: Not just to support doing JSON things,
but also to use that functionality to facilitate creation of tools to
solve other problems.

I get that you're not sold on the idea, but I wanted to try to make the
case for it. I had been working on a set of loadable modules meant as a
kind of proof-of-concept providing these kind of capabilities, I should
really just get back to that sometime.