[draegtun]

Here's a video where Crockford mentions Rebol (and others) being an influence on JSON - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-C-JoyNuQJs&t=1233s

I've seen it mentioned on Rebol chatter that Crockford approached Carl Sassenrath (creator of Rebol) to open-source & use Rebol prior to creating JSON. So having a Javascript literal wasn't on Crockford's mind at that point.

NB. Rebol was closed sourced until 2012.