Having quoted keys would definitely be a nice feature. Though even better would be allowing colons or equals signs for the key/value separator so you can use a colon like basically every other language.

On Railo, you can use struct/array literals as expressions, meaning you can use them in CFRETURN, as function/method arguments, or any where else. The only-assignment restriction is a ColdFusion issue, not a CFML issue. So people are implementing it correctly, just Adobe totally dropped the ball.

I'd really like to see allowing quoted strings in the name part.

{ "Something With Spaces" = [ "a", "b", "c" ] }

php, ruby, python, perl, groovy, javascript, as3 … Everyone has literal notation like this now that allows quotes and proper nesting.

Why are we in the stone age? :/

With CF 8.0.1, you can mix-and-match nested array and struct literals (e.g. [{id=1}, {id=2}]). It was only disallowed in the initial 8.0 release.

Even more perplexing for the '=' decision is that both JavaScript, and named CFC/UDF parameters use the ':'. The '=' is accepted for named CFC/UDF parameters, but not required. To make it consistent with the existing language features, they should have at least allowed both. I'd have preferred to only allow ':' and deprecate the '=' in CFC/UDF parameters, but oh well.

I wasn't aware you couldn't nest structs using literal syntax either, interesting.

Joshua nailed it.

The third example is insane - it doesn't make any sense at all - and that's my point. As near as I can tell, that represents how ColdFusion evaluates the first snippet, instead of doing it like the second snippet (which is correct).

It's about order of operations. The first fragment should be evaluated from the inside out, NOT the outside in. s should not be modified until the entire block has been evaluated. The third block looks strange because that is how CF8 decides to implement it. Just paste the first block into a test page on CF8 and think to yourself, why does this error?

Think of a duck typed use case, like barney's example. s could be called, animals for example. He has a simple list representation as a starting point, but decides to transform it into a complex structure and… oh lets say he's in a cfc function body. Why go to all the trouble to var yet another variable to represent the same data in a different form, we arn't going to need the list afterward… GONK.

I think the wish list gets broadcast to the whole development team, which is both good and bad, because I'm not sure if any one person takes ownership of it.

Waiting for the bug base as well. But, once the committees are setup, we can barrage members as well who are managing the specific area we find issues with.