I disagree. Adding a capability for other indices down the road is NOT compatible for existing uses, so adding it will cause confusion ("are you using the old JSON Pointer or the new one?") and interop problems.
IIRC the discussion in the WG went much along these lines, and led to us explicitly choosing a single character, rather than a misleading "-1" construct. I'd be more comfortable with changing the character to something even further away, rather than making this construct even more confusing.
The other way we could go would be to do full negative indexing; we don't have any use cases for that, and it increases complexity a bit, but at least it would be unsurprising.
On 18/12/2012, at 6:54 AM, Barry Leiba <barryleiba@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>> This was discussed in the Working Group, but it wasn't felt that the added
>>> complexity was worth it; there's a strong feeling that this spec should be as
>>> simple as possible.
>>
>> Might I suggest, however, using -1 instead of "-" to refer to the last item in an
>> array, as this provides two benefits:
>>
>> 1) Allows for adding the complexity down the road in a compatible way, should
>> there be need
>> 2) Uniformity; i.e. always using integer values for referring to array elements.
>
> I have to say that this suggestion sounds very compelling to me, for
> both reasons. I know there's a bunch of running code out there, but
> this (and perhaps teasing apart the "add" and "insert" concepts into
> separate verbs) seems worth the bother.
>
> Barry, as participant
--
Mark Nottingham http://www.mnot.net/