Exactly this. If you didn't do a compilers class and you want a simple language to play around with for lexing/parsing, JSON works great. Here's the core of a

Exactly this. If you didn't do a compilers class and you want a simple language to play around with for lexing/parsing, JSON works great. Here's the core of a probably correct JSON lexer, albeit a super inefficient one, that I whipped up in <110 lines of Python a few years ago out of curiosity[1]. By comparison, check out the state machine transitions at the heart of the cpython implementation of the csv module[2]. It's not really a fair comparison (my JSON lexer is written in Python and uses regexes, the csv parser is written in C and does not use regexes) but even ignoring how nicely the csv parser handles different csv dialects, I still find it strictly more complex. [1]: https://github.com/chucksmash/jsonish/blob/master/jsonish/tokens.py https://github.com/chucksmash/jsonish/blob/master/jsonish/to... [2]: https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/41c57b335330ff48af098d47e379e0f9ba09d233/Modules/_csv.c#L591 https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/41c57b335330ff48af098...