AEON JSON Profile — Appendix

Profile Identifier: "json"

Purpose

The JSON Profile defines AEON → JSON transformation for interoperability with REST APIs, databases, and JSON tooling.

Declaration

Transformation Rules

Objects → JSON Objects

→

Lists → JSON Arrays

Direct mapping. Order preserved.

Booleans → JSON Booleans

true/false pass through.

Toggle → JSON Boolean

Numbers → JSON Numbers

• If within safe range (±2^53): number
• If exceeds range: string (unless schema forbids)

Strings → JSON Strings

• Use double quotes
• Normalize escapes

References → Resolved Values

Reference handling is profile/consumer policy:

• if references are resolved upstream, JSON output contains materialized values
• if unresolved references are passed through, JSON output may retain reference tokens and emit diagnostics

Resolved example:

→

Note: JSON cannot preserve clone/pointer identity semantics. Interoperability output may lose aliasing information.

Attributes → @ Projection

→

Nested object attributes stay local to the object that owns the attributed bindings:

→

Notes:

• @ is reserved in finalized/materialized JSON projection for attributes;
• exact collisions on @ are profile errors;
• keys like @a remain ordinary user keys.

Indexed child attributes may be projected under reserved @items metadata on the owning binding:

Profile notes:

• @items is reserved in finalized/materialized JSON projection for indexed child attributes;
• this is a projection/profile convention, not a core canonical-path syntax change;
• exact collisions on @items are profile errors.

Projected Materialization

Consumers may request projected materialization instead of whole-document materialization.

Projected materialization rules:

• the source AEON/AES may contain additional bindings;
• only the requested canonical paths are materialized into the JSON output;
• ancestors needed to reach the requested paths are preserved;
• this is a materialization policy, not a schema failure by itself.

Illustrative policy:

This produces a JSON object containing only the materialized $.app.name branch.

If a processor also needs to reject unexpected bindings rather than merely omit them from output, that is controlled by AEOS schema world = "closed", not by the JSON profile itself.

Type Annotations → Stripped

Type information is not preserved in JSON output.

Temporal Types → Strings

→

ZRUT literals preserve the & syntax in the string.

Legal AEON infinity literals are not representable in the strict JSON profile. Processors claiming strict JSON-profile conformance MUST fail closed rather than silently rewriting them. Loose or compatibility-oriented exporters MAY preserve Infinity and -Infinity as strings, but that behavior is outside the strict JSON profile contract.

Hex and Radix Literals → JSON Strings

Hex and radix literals finalize as JSON strings of their payload form rather than as JSON numbers.

• hex finalized strings exclude the leading #;
• radix finalized strings exclude the leading %;
• _ visual separators are removed during finalized JSON materialization;
• hex finalized strings preserve source letter case unless a stricter downstream profile defines canonical normalization.

Separator Literals → String or Array

Baseline JSON finalization preserves separator payload as string:

Schema- or consumer-driven split/materialization into arrays is an optional downstream transform.

Comments → Removed

Excluded Features

The following are NOT supported in JSON profile:

• unresolved semantic aliasing (~> identity cannot be represented natively in JSON)
• NaN, Infinity

Error Model

End of JSON Profile Appendix