To clarify: What bugs me about this isn't really that there are commas. If that makes the parsing simpler, I won't mind having to type them, and having them the

To clarify: What bugs me about this isn't really that there are commas. If that makes the parsing simpler, I won't mind having to type them, and having them there doesn't make the code less readable. They might not be needed technically, but I can live with that. What annoys me is that you can't end a list in a comma: [ 1, 2 ] is valid, whereas [ 1, 2, ] isn't. This means that if you generate JSON (and if you're using a lower level language you might not want to import a library just for that), you'll have to make a) either the first or the last entry of your sequence a "special case" (omit the comma) or b) backtrack after the string generation and erase the last comma if there are any entries. On top of that, AFAIK Ecmascript allowed trailing commas since its inception (in array literals, that is), while JSON doesn't.