You wouldn't use this for arbitrary object serialization. Lists can only contain strings, not other lists or dictionaries.
As for stringification, JSON's data types are mismatched with pretty much everything that isn't JavaScript to some degree. If you need to serialize a 64-bit integer to JSON, you serialize it as a string because the parser on the other end is probably going to try to parse it as a double-precision floating point number. Once you've started serializing numbers as strings anyway, it's not too far to "serialize every scalar as a string".
Well, there's nothing about the JSON spec that says you can't serialize 64-bit integers to JSON. The grammar allows unlimited precision. Implementations may vary.
> Lists can only contain strings, not other lists or dictionaries.
I don’t think this is true. None of the examples have lists containing non-string objects, but the documentation doesn’t seem to draw a distinction between lists and dictionaries wrt what can be placed in them.
(Both lists and dictionaries are initially described as only containing strings, and later this description is expanded to include nesting; this counterintuitive arrangement may explain the confusion.)
Ah ha, got it. The page never really makes it clear that this is for configuration files only, not serialization.
Indeed, not being able to have lists of dictionaries, or lists of lists, is very restrictive. Seems to be for very simple configurations only. E.g. a set of preferences, but not a set of monitor calibrations. (Inventing arbitrary dictionary keys seems pretty hacky.)
As for stringification, JSON's data types are mismatched with pretty much everything that isn't JavaScript to some degree. If you need to serialize a 64-bit integer to JSON, you serialize it as a string because the parser on the other end is probably going to try to parse it as a double-precision floating point number. Once you've started serializing numbers as strings anyway, it's not too far to "serialize every scalar as a string".