First off, make no mistake, JSON and sexprs ARE serialization formats. I didn't establish this well in my orignal comment. However, they're designed be a notati

First off, make no mistake, JSON and sexprs ARE serialization formats. I didn't establish this well in my orignal comment. However, they're designed be a notation for specific structures: dicts and arrays in json's case, and cons cells, specifically Lisp code in the case of sexprs. This is unlike say, XML, which defines a tree hierarchy, but NOT what the underlying structures are. That's the parser's job.