> This really never made sense It always made perfect sense, given JSON was invented as a data exchange format. It was never intended to be written out by hand

> This really never made sense It always made perfect sense, given JSON was invented as a data exchange format. It was never intended to be written out by hand. > I find adding property like __pragma: nicer than comments. It has the same problem as he stated It does not, because that is data which every JSON parser will at least parse if not interpret. A comment is something a parser has no reason to yield, which means smuggling metadata in comments makes the document itself inconsistent between parsers which do and parsers which don't[0] expose comments. And this was not a fancy Crockford made up, smuggling processing instructions in comments was ubiquitous in Java at the time, as well as HTML/XML, where it literally still is a thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conditional_comment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conditional_comment. [0] and possibly can't, how do you deserialize a comment in the middle of an object to JS or Ruby