On Sat, Mar 08, 2003 at 07:25:16PM +0100, Jochen Wiedmann wrote:
> Quoting Ken Williams <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
>
> > Why in the world would you be required to write a parser??
>
> Because I possibly would want to read these files automatically?
> Your original posting explicitly stated that this is just what
> they are made for.
*You* do not need to write a parser. Parsers are already written.
perl -MYAML -e 'print Dumper YAML::LoadFile("META.yml")'
Perl
http://search.cpan.org/author/INGY/YAML-0.35/
Python
http://wiki.yaml.org/yamlwiki/PurePythonParserForYaml
Ruby
http://yaml4r.sourceforge.net/
> > I do appreciate your point of view, but I can also tell you that for
> > every person that asks why we're not using XML for this, there's
> > another person who's written me telling me how glad he/she is that
> > we're not.
>
> I absolutely believe that. The difference is, that in 2 or
> 3 years, when an XML parser (however "wierd") will be installed
> on any uptodate Perl system, noone will ask "Why are we using
> XML and not YAML?". In the contrary case the question will
> stick forever, because you have a lot of users as stupid as
> me. It doesn't take much prophecy to foresee that.
"Its popular" is not a compelling argument. Otherwise we'd all be using
Java and XML on Intel machines running Windows and nobody would be bothering
with Module::Build we'd just be clunking along with MakeMaker. If all
things were equal between YAML and XML then yes, we'd go with the more
popular one. But they're not equal and popularity doesn't weigh much.
We must have the courage to try new things if we think they will work out
better.
