[Haskell-cafe] Ordered JSON objects?

[Richard A. O'Keefe]

On 17/12/2014, at 9:59 pm, Wojtek Narczyński <wojtek at power.com.pl> wrote:

> On 17.12.2014 00:12, Richard A. O'Keefe wrote:
>> So if you depend on the order of the name/value pairs in
>> a JSON object, you doing something surpassing strange and
>> risky.
> All I wanted to do was to keep the order of key-value pairs in accordance with the order of fields in their corresponding haskell records, during serialization. I guess that would be okay.

At some point, you convert an internal value to a “JSON” form, x.
You hand that over to some other JSON-handling software,
and eventually get the “same” value back, x’.
The other JSON-handling software could be something as simple as
[StdIn skipSeparators] whileFalse: [
  StdOut printJson: StdIn nextJson; cr].

Now x’ may *legitimately* be different from x, both in the amount
and location of white space, the presence or absence of leading
and trailing zeros in numbers, the use or non-use of \u escapes
in strings, *and the order of key/value pairs in objects*.

So if your program depends on the order of key/value pairs,
you cannot trust JSON-handling software you have not writtern
yourself to preserve your extra semantics.

That’s what I mean by “risky”.

For reasons having to to with compressibility, I’d probably
use
 {“fields” : [“f1”,..,”fn”],
  “values” : [v1,  .., vn ]
 }
if I wanted safe interoperability with 3rd-party JSON support.
>