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I think there may be a terminological disconnect here. S-expressions and canonical S-expressions are not the same thing. S-expressions (non-canonical) are a comparable to JSON, intended to be read and written by humans, and actually much easier to read and write than JSON because it uses less punctuation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-expression

A canonical S-expression is a binary format, intended to be both generated and parsed by machines, not humans:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canonical_S-expressions



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