On Mar 1, 2:08 pm, Paul Rubin <no.em...@nospam.invalid> wrote: > Yaml sucks, but seems to have gotten some traction regardless.
Yes, that's actually one of the reasons I want to do this. I've heard that some of the YAML people want that in the standard library, and IMHO that would be a huge mistake. > Therefore the Python principle of "there should be one and only one > obvious way to do it" says: don't try to replace the existing thing if > your new thing is only slightly better. But for my use-case, YAML is irretrievably broken. Sure, it looks reasonably nice, but it increases regression runtime unacceptably. Also, despite their current protestations that Yaml AIN'T markup language, the syntax still belies its markup roots. I'm looking for a configuration language, not a markup language. > Just deal with the existing thing's imperfections or make improvements to it. Well, I've looked at the YAML parser and I can assure you that I will not be contributing to that project. > If you can make a really powerful case that your new thing is 1000x better > than the old thing, that's different, but I don't think we're seeing that > here. Well, there's no way I'm hitting three orders of magnitude, but I don't think the bar is really that high. We will see. > Also, XML is used for pretty much everything in the Java world. It > sucks too, but it is highly standardized, it observably gets the job > done, there are tons of structure editors for it, etc. Frankly > I'd rather have stayed with it than deal with Yaml. XML can certainly be made readable by humans. It's hard to make it writeable by (average) humans just using a regular text editor, and even though there are tons of structure editors, requiring non- technical people to find one of those and start using it is a non- starter in many cases. But I can't strongly disagree with the opinion that YAML doesn't offer all that much over it. > There are too many of these damn formats. We should ban all but one of > them (I don't much care which one). And making even more of them is not > the answer. Well, I think that XML and YAML both overreach by trying to be all things to all applications. So I'm aiming a lot lower than that. I just want to make really good configuration files that are easy to modify in a text editor. None of the existing formats are suitable. I may be the only one who feels that way. OTOH, if we never invented new things, then I wouldn't be enjoying restructured text, and I'd be missing out on a lot there... Regards, Pat -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
