alt Hacker News> most programming languages internal memory representations
Often heard wrt JSON but incorrect. It maps to the primitive types in JavaScript. But almost all programming languages treat floats and integers different, make distinction between char and strings and many have some form of date/time. JSON has neither.
In that direction, XML is much closer since every node is a triple (name, value, attributes) so can have type info, json is a tuple. And Protobuf, while not popular, gets this completely right.
I think it's too risky to treat numbers in JSON as something else than IEEE754 64bits floats. But yes, JSON is small and doesn't do datetimes, char, comments, and a million other things XML does.
But you don't need to think much about memory representation when you parse a JSON, and the developer experience is a lot more pleasing than browsing a XML tree. That what used to matter.