D JSON (WAT?!)

[Ary Borenszweig via Digitalmars-d-learn]

On 7/24/14, 1:09 PM, Justin Whear wrote:
> On Thu, 24 Jul 2014 16:04:01 +0000, Pavel wrote:
>>
>> Thanks to all you folks who explained "in" operator for me. My bad.
>> Let's focus on the real problem, which is JSON wrapper class. Is it
>> needed? Wouldn't it be better to get AA from parseJSON?
>
> The following are valid JSON:
>
> auto json1 = parseJSON(`1`);
> auto json2 = parseJSON(`"foo"`);
> auto json3 = parseJSON(`[1, 2, 3]`);
>
> None of these fit naturally into an JSONValue[string] return type.

Nope, a JSON can only be an array or an object (hash).

In Crystal we have this definition:

alias JsonType = Nil | Bool | Int64 | Float64 | String | Array(JsonType) 
| Hash(String, JsonType)

(note that this is a recursive type definition)

Then when you do Json.parse you get a value whose type is 
Array(JsonType) | Hash(String, JsonType).

The good thing about this is that Json.parse gives you types that 
already exist: Array, Hash, Int64, etc. No need to define extra types 
and no need for users to learn a new API with new types.

Wouldn't something like this be better to do in D? That is, return 
something that is an array or an associative array...