Re: Types, byte codes etc.

On Thu, 2007-05-10 at 10:24 -0400, Brad Baxter wrote:

> So my question/point-of-discussion is: Could the newlines separating
> tokens in the canonical structure be replaced with spaces and still
> allow a YAML parser to correctly parse the structure?

Almost.

> Currently,
> the answer is no for at least three reasons: 
> 
> comments: # comment

If you are going for a one-liner, you'd probably want to strip away the
comments anyway. Remember they are essentially a form of white space,
just like indentation, which also can't be conveyed in a one-line
format :-)

> directives: %YAML 1.2, %TAG !o! tag:ben-kiki.org,2000:

Stickier problem. Yes, these need to be each on their own line. That
said... on a one-liner, you would probably get rid of them as well, say
by using verbatim tag. Less readable, but you have throw readability out
the door already anyway. BTW, this is what we'll be doing in the
canonical/byte code format.

> end of document markers: ...

We can write one object per line:

--- { ... }
--- { ... }

Multiple objects in the same line is cheating :-)

> There may be others, but these are the ones I found that seem to 
> rely on a newline to end them.

I don't think there are any others.

> I don't know about "need", but I for one would not mind being able
> to store serialized objects in a flat file, one object per line.

You can do that, as shown above. Minus the comments.

> I guess the bottom line is simply this: Why not allow a YAML
> stream, in its canonical form, to fit on a singe line?

While this might have been an interesting requirement to pursue a few
years back, at this point it would require making changes to the spec
and barring a compelling use case (like we had for JSON compatibility),
we won't be doing that.

Have fun,

	Oren Ben-Kiki


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