In its simplest form, CUE looks a lot like JSON. This is because CUE is a superset of JSON.
Or, put differently: all valid JSON is CUE (but not vice versa).

CUE significantly reduces the pain of dealing with JSON by introducing several conveniences, including:

  • C-style comments are allowed
  • field names without special characters don’t need to be quoted
  • commas after a field are optional (and are usually omitted)
  • commas after the final element of a list are allowed
  • the outermost curly braces in a CUE file are optional

JSON objects are called structs or maps in CUE. JSON arrays are called lists
Object members are called fields, which link their name, or label, to a value.

file.cue
import "math"

// Simple labels don't need to be quoted.
one:       1
two:       2
piPlusOne: math.Pi + 1

// Field names must be quoted if they contain
// special characters, such as hyphen and space.
"quoted field names": {
	"two-and-a-half":    2.5
	"three point three": 3.3
	"four^four":         math.Pow(4, 4)
}

aList: [
	1,
	2,
	3,
]
TERMINAL
$ cue export file.cue --out json
{
    "one": 1,
    "two": 2,
    "piPlusOne": 4.141592653589793238462643383279503,
    "quoted field names": {
        "two-and-a-half": 2.5,
        "three point three": 3.3,
        "four^four": 256
    },
    "aList": [
        1,
        2,
        3
    ]
}