in JSON, Why is each name quoted?

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I leave a quote from a presentation that Douglas Crockford (the creator of the JSON standard) gave to Yahoo.

He talks about how he discovered JSON, and amongst other things why he decided to use quoted keys:

….
That was when we discovered the
unquoted name problem. It turns out
ECMA Script 3 has a whack reserved
word policy. Reserved words must be
quoted in the key position, which is
really a nuisance. When I got around
to formulizing this into a standard, I
didn’t want to have to put all of the
reserved words in the standard,
because it would look really stupid.

At the time, I was trying to convince
people: yeah, you can write
applications in JavaScript, it’s
actually going to work and it’s a good
language. I didn’t want to say, then,
at the same time: and look at this
really stupid thing they did! So I
decided, instead, let’s just quote the
keys.
That way, we don’t have to tell
anybody about how whack it is.

That’s why, to this day, keys are quoted in
JSON.

You can find the complete video and transcript here.

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