Re: Literal for plain style string

On Thu, Aug 09, 2007 at 03:11:11PM -0700, Ingy dot Net wrote:
| On 09/08/07 09:32 -0400, Clark C. Evans wrote:
| > As much as this is a good idea, I'm afrid it'd be very hard to just make
| > this change -- it would require a directive at the very minimum.
| 
| Clark, can you state why you think it would be hard? Not that I don't believe
| you, but at this point it's just handwaving.

Agreed, it is handwaving, since the proposal isn't detailed enough to
give a cost estimate.  That said, on the face value, it seems to be a
very ambitious proposal. 

As I understand the idea, we'd completely re-think the plain style, which
combines a single-line form and a multi-line form (or, both, starting on
the first line and then continuing on to subsequent lines).  Assuming
that we could agree on the semantics, it'd be a very large set of
changes both to the specification proper as well as regression tests
and the implementation.

| I think the directive could be
|     %YAML 1.1
| to get the old behaviour :)
| 

Well, as you state, most people don't use the header.  So, what is the
likely impact be?  Consider,

    ---
    - This is a paragraph
      that continues on the
      third line.
    - this is a # comment
    -
      # this is also a comment
      but this isn't

This is currently equivalent to:

    ['This is a paragraph that continues on the third line.',
     'this is a', "but this isn't"]

I'm not exactly clear what the proposed rewrite would be.  But, I'm
certain it would change the meaning of a great deal of content out
there.  I'm not convinced that value in the improvement would be worth
the cost.   I think we have smaller refinements I'd rather tackle before
we explored this one further.

Thanks for listening,

Clark

| > On Wed, Aug 08, 2007 at 02:44:01PM -0700, TRANS wrote:
| > | I would like to make a repeated proposal that a future version of YAML
| > | make the plan style string literal vs. the current folding.
| > | 
| > | I suggested this before b/c it better suited using YAML as a means of
| > | storing programming code b/c many programming languages use a new line
| > | to indicate the end of a statement. The repetitive use of '|' was
| > | unsightly and easy to forget.
| > | 
| > | Now I have discovered another use. I use YAML for configuration files
| > | as much as possible. But a simple line by line list is generally too
| > | convenient to replace with YAML. However if the default string style
| > | were literal, then such a file would already be vaild YAML (I make an
| > | exception for the mandatory %YAML directive b/c implementations tend
| > | not to enforce this.) In other words a file that looked like:
| > | 
| > |   some/file/path1
| > |   some/file/path2
| > |   some/file/path3
| > | 
| > | could be loaded by YAML and would look just as the original file
| > | appears. Currently, the specification causes all these lines to merge
| > | into one line which, obviously, makes the entries ambiguous and
| > | useless.
| > 

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