On Tue, Jun 16, 2020 at 07:11:57PM -0700, Guido van Rossum wrote:
On Tue, Jun 16, 2020 at 5:45 PM Steven D'Aprano
wrote: Please forgive the stupid question, but given that the JSON standard is so obviously broken (being unable to serialise valid values from a supported type, what on earth were they thinking???), wouldn't all this time and energy be better aimed at fixing the standard rather than making Python's JSON encoder broken by default?
You're kidding, right?
Was what I said so stupid that even when prefixed with an acknowledgement that it was a stupid question, you can't imagine how anyone could ask the question? What exactly is getting in the way here? Standards do change. One standard (JSON) is not capable of representing all values from another standard (IEEE-754). Removing NANs and INFs would break floating point software everywhere, and a lot of hardware too. Adding support for them to JSON would be an enhancement, not a breakage. In my ignorance, that seems like a no-brainer. So I don't understand your point here. Is it...? That the behaviour of JSON is perfect as it is. That it's not perfect, but there are reasons *aside from the standard* why it can't be changed. That it's not possible to change the standard, even if you managed to get (let's say...) Mozilla and Microsoft on board. It's possible to change the standard, but that costs a lot of money, and nobody cares enough to spend it. Or something else? -- Steven