On Tue, 09 Mar 2010 03:09:51 -0500, Alexander Suhoverhov
<[email protected]> wrote:
Steven Schveighoffer at "Mon, 08 Mar 2010 15:23:51 -0500" wrote:
SS> On Mon, 08 Mar 2010 15:12:24 -0500, bearophile
<[email protected]> wrote:
>> Steven Schveighoffer:
>>> Tell me how you would parse the following text serialization string
for a
>>> string[]:
>>>
>>> hello world how are you
>>>
>>> What if it was a string[][]?
>>>
>>> Compare that to:
>>>
>>> [hello world, [how are, you]]
>>
>> You are missing something:
>>
>> ["hello world", ["how are", "you"]]
SS> For completely unambiguous, yes. But still, I find often that
quotes are more noise than
SS> they are worth when just doing simple printouts. What we want is
the most useful
SS> default.
Commas are even more noise than than quotes. erlang:
[{app, "app1"}, {user, "user1"}, {score, 123456}, {date, 5000000},
{misc, "foo"}]
But if you just drop commas:
[{app "app1"} {user "user1"} {score 123456} {date 5000000} {misc "foo"}]
If you are used to writing code, you should be used to having commas. The
two major use cases for 'to!string' are debugging and maybe serialization,
both programmer tasks. Plus, in your examples, you have quotes for
strings. That negates the need for commas, but I don't know if having
'to' convert strings to having quotes only for arrays makes sense.
Outputting an array should be a recursive thing. At the very least, we
need either a non-whitespace separator or quotes to delineate strings.
Brackets are a must to see the separation for multi-dimensional arrays.
-Steve
