[jfischer]

I think comments are really a bad idea. If you want comments, either make them explicit properties in your data structures or use something else like YAML or XML. JSON is the most practical language out there for inter-machine and inter-program data representation.

JSON has two unique properties among data representation languages that make it useful for certain types of tasks: 1) it is very simple to write conformant parsers and serializers, and 2) the parsed representation contains all the original semantic information in the original document (excluding maybe whitespace). If you have a separate syntax for comments, then parsers must either drop the comments (making transformation tools less powerful) or parser must provide a more complex representation (e.g. like the DOM) and drop the simple map/list/scalar data model.

Please don't make JSON the next XML! Source: I spent about 5 years suffering with XML in the Enterprise Application Integration world.