Accept and ignore colon between key and value in map literals

Question

Original title was 'treat colons as whitespace' which isn't a problem description but a (flawed) implementation approach

For JSON compatibility
known problems when no spaces - x:true and y:false

Answer 1

Comment made by: tsdh

Discussed here: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/clojure/XvJUzaY1jec/l8xEwlFl8EUJ

Answer 2

Comment made by: hiredman

please no

Answer 3

Comment made by: tavisrudd

Alan Malloy raises a good point in the google group discussion (https://groups.google.com/d/msg/clojure/XvJUzaY1jec/aVpWBicwGhsJ) about accidental confusion between trailing (or floating) and leading colons:
"It isn't even as simple as "letting them
be whitespace", because presumably you want (read-string "{a: b}") to
result in (hash-map 'a 'b), but (read-string "{a :b}") to result in
(hash-map 'a :b)."

This issue could be avoided by only treating a colon as whitespace when followed by a comma. As easy cut-paste of json seems the be the key motivation here, the commas are going to be there anyway: valid {"v":, 1234} vs syntax error {a-key: should-be-a-keyword}.

Answer 4

Comment made by: alexbaranosky

This would be visually confusing imo.

Answer 5

Comment made by: laurentpetit

Please, oh please, no.

Answer 6

Comment made by: tavisrudd

Er, brain fart. I was typing faster than I was thinking and put the comma in the wrong place. In my head I meant the form following the colon would have to have a comma after it. Thus, {"a-json-key": 1234, ...} would be valid while {"a-json-key": was-supposed-to-be-a-keyword "another-json-key" foo} would complain about the colon being an Invalid Token. I don't see the need for it, however.

Answer 7

Comment made by: solussd

Clojure already has reader syntax for a map. If we support JSON, do we also support ruby map literals? Seems like this addition would only add confusion, imo, given colons are used in keywords and keywords are frequently used in maps - e.g., when de-serializing from XML, or even JSON. :)

Answer 8

Comment made by: dnolen

Clojure is no longer a language hosted only on the JVM. Clojure is also hosted on the CLR, and JavaScript. In particular ClojureScript can't currently easily deal with JSON literals - an extremely common (though problematic) data format. By allowing colon whitespace in map literals - Clojure data structures can effectively become an extensible JSON superset - giving the succinctness of JSON and the expressiveness of XML.

+1 from me.

Answer 9

Comment made by: timmc

Clojure is only hosted on the JVM; ClojureScript is hosted on JS VMs. If this is useful for CLJS, it should just be a CLJS feature.

Answer 10

Comment made by: mikera

-1 for this whole idea: that way madness lies....

If we keep adding syntactical oddities like this then the language will become unmaintainably complex. It's the exact opposite of simple to have lots of special cases and ambiguities that you have to remember.

If people want to use JSON that is fine, but then the best approach use a specific JSON parser/writer, not just paste it into Clojure source and expect it to work.

Answer 11

Comment made by: laczoka

-1 for reasons mentioned by Allan Malloy and Mike Anderson

Answer 12

Comment made by: bozhidar

-1 Don't repeat the mistake made in Ruby...

Answer 13

Reference: https://clojure.atlassian.net/browse/CLJ-899 (reported by stu)