Am 25.08.2014 18:40, schrieb Jonathan Marler:
Hello everyone,
I've been working on SDL support for DUB and wanted to get some people's
opinions on whether we should really use SDL. I've posted my thoughts
here:
http://forum.rejectedsoftware.com/groups/rejectedsoftware.dub/thread/2263/
Just sharing my (overdue) more detailed view on this:
Pros:
- Easier to parse
- Slightly nicer handling of "enum" values due to quote-less strings
- Whitespace insensitive
Cons:
- I *really* dislike the "application specific"/"nameless tags" part
of it, because generic handling always was one of the basic
prerequisites for me
- It's a still custom format in practice, even without the "application
specific" part - except if it (ever) becomes more widespread
- Confusing wealth of syntax possibilities when punctuation can be
omitted, I'd very much prefer one way to express one thing
- A language with neither newline sensitivity, nor required tag
terminators, I think is bound to give very bad error message in
certain situations
- Quote-less strings, especially when mixed with nameless tags or
omitted punctuation can be very confusing
- Quote-less strings which are allowed to contain punctuation are
confusing, because the punctuation can easily be confused as being
part of the ASON syntax itself
To me, this currently outweighs by far the disadvantages that SDL has:
- Sensitive to newlines, but not other whitespace. This is convenient,
although I'd prefer a mandatory semicolon (which ASON doesn't have
either)
- Some parser complexities not needed for DUB (e.g. date/time types).
I'm more or less "meh" about this. It can be nice to have for other
uses (configuration files) and doesn't really hurt either.
But most important is that SDL is already in use for other (non-minor)
projects [1] and thus has probably much better chances to become more
widespread than "yet another JSON extension format" (this is not
critique of the approach of extending JSON, but rather of how the
average observer would likely perceive a format advertised that way).
Continuing on that point, an important point for choosing a format was
to minimize the amount of DUB specific syntax to learn. So if somebody
has to learn a new language for that, it should at least also be useful
in other places and any newly invented format is just much less likely
to generally useful than something that already has some level of
popularity.
[1]: http://sdl.ikayzo.org/display/SDL/Projects+Using+SDL
