The following examples illustrate strange behavior with the shell REPL's handling of objects with an _id field. Note that all of these should be valid, and should print the object itself:
> {_id:1} 1 > {'_id':1} 2014-02-04T11:51:48.382-0500 SyntaxError: Unexpected token : > {"_id":1} 2014-02-04T11:51:54.014-0500 SyntaxError: Unexpected token : > var a = {"_id":1} > a { "_id" : 1 } > var a = {_id:1} > a { "_id" : 1 }