Andy Armstrong wrote: > Of course the idea of the YAMLish dialect negates this one somewhat: > > "JSON is, effectively, a subset of YAML. If your producer emits > JSON then a YAML parser will > read it. The inverse is not true." > > I'm still in favour of YAMLish on largely aesthetic grounds but I > have to say that I don't think any of the objections to JSON are > overwhelming. > > If we /were/ going to allow JSON now would be the time to do it.
Producing TAP is so much easier than consuming it (YAML or JSON). Additionally the producer is strongly tied with a particular programming language while a good consumer is language agnostic. For these reasons there will always be far more producers than consumers. Therefore its more important that a producer be easier to write than a consumer. Which its why its more important that a producer can use a JSON library, in place of a possibly harder to find YAML library, then a consumer. Thus it should be a design goal of YAMLish to retain JSON compatibility. As JSON is so simple I don't think it will take much. The inline hash/array syntax, already useful for other reasons, should be all we need to add. The big hurdle to writing a TAP consumer isn't going to be finding a YAML library, its going to be parsing TAP. Folks are going to whinge no matter what we choose. JSON has little going for it over YAML except "more people use it" and even that's probably by a slim margin compared to "those who have neither".
