Re: Including sjson (formerly (ice-9 json)) and fash.scm in guile proper?

[Mark H Weaver <mhw@netris.org>]

Hi Chris,

Christopher Allan Webber <cwebber@dustycloud.org> writes:
> So a while ago, David Thompson submitted (ice-9 json) to Guile proper.
> A few changes were requested, so it hadn't made it in.  In the meanwhile
> I began using it for a number of projects.  I also added some
> modifications and extensions: #nil became 'null for the representation
> of null values,

Most of the modifications you've made are good, but I'm very
uncomfortable with the use of #nil in this API.  #nil is a terrible hack
which may not even be adequate for its intended use case.  Its existence
in any data structure is likely to cause misbehavior in other Scheme
code that is exposed to it, because it violates a longstanding fact in
Scheme that there is only one value that is treated as "false".  It
would also make it difficult or impossible to port this library, and
thus anything that depends on this library, to other Scheme systems.  We
should not promote its use by incorporating it into new APIs.

What do you think?

Otherwise, I'm generally in favor of incorporating this library into
Guile, after we make sure that it is robust against malicious inputs.

    Regards,
      Mark