Remove sized containers

kxepal commented 12 years ago

The ARRAY and OBJECT types no longer have a length argument; all containers (like JSON) are considered to be unbounded. In the existing spec, this is know as the Streaming support. Both container types begin with their maker character (‘A’ or ‘O’) and are terminated with a standalone ‘E’. Using the numeric child count before made no sense in the context of containers that contain unbounded containers and the like; the paradigm fell apart quickly and added unneeded confusion to the spec (some thought it was a byte count)

ghost commented 11 years ago

Marking as WONTFIX, I feel pretty strongly about the sized containers -- I'll clarify my stance further on Issue #16

ghost commented 11 years ago

Re-opening, @kxepal clarified the errors of my thinking on #16

SUMMARY (so I don't forget later)

Sized containers (either child count OR byte size) is a great optimization but falls apart as soon as you have mixed-types in the container, see: https://github.com/thebuzzmedia/universal-binary-json/issues/16#issuecomment-15352496
JSON allows any mixed types in ARRAY and OBJECT containers, therefore the container sizing is of minimal help.
It is agreed that in MOST cases, containers are of homogeneous (same) type so the sized container makes the perfect sense there.
To that end, it seems that sized containers should not be addressed until we figure out/finalize #13 (strongly typed containers) in Draft 10

ghost commented 11 years ago

ACCEPTED

Merged into Draft 9 spec: http://ubjson.org/type-reference/

ubjson / universal-binary-json

Remove sized containers #6