On: Intercal, YAML, and Other Horrible Programming Lan...

[coldtea]

Parent means YAML-like JSON-lite format, so you could have multiple elemnts without commas or braces, just with whitespace and newlines as separators.

Where JSON here is just a stand-in for "simple format with few types", not about it being parseable as JSON or anything.

[thaumasiotes → coldtea]

If all you have are record separators, so that the only data you can send is a list of values distinguished by nothing other than the order in which they occur, then the information about the structure of the data must exist separately on both the sending side and the receiving side. Better hope they agree.

But regardless, I feel like that exists right now; doesn't this describe protocol buffers?

[coldtea → thaumasiotes]

Parent said no commas or braces. He didn't say "all you have are record separators".

E.g.: a list:

  - foo
  - bar
  - buz and other things besides

list of dicts:

  persons:
    - name: John Smith
      age: 54
      occupation: Obergruppenführer
    - name: Frank Frink
      age: 32
      occupation: craftsman 

(Those are already valid YAML iirc)

[thaumasiotes → coldtea]

> Parent said no commas or braces. He didn't say "all you have are record separators".

No, he didn't, he said "JSON without commas or braces". That makes no sense.

You were the one who specified nothing but record separators:

>>> you could have multiple elemnts without commas or braces, just with whitespace and newlines as separators.

And sure, that approach has upsides and downsides compared to JSON, which is why it's already a widespread alternative to JSON.

Your proposal here is just JSON that looks slightly different. The reason we don't have that is that we do have that, with isomorphic syntax, and we call it "JSON". There's nothing at all interesting about the idea of "JSON without commas" if you satisfy it by saying "we've eliminated the comma by relabeling it as a 'hyphen' in some cases and a 'tab' in the rest".

[coldtea → thaumasiotes]

>No, he didn't, he said "JSON without commas or braces". That makes no sense.

Strictly interpreted, no, it doesn't.

But I picked his intention, and clarified it already as: "Where JSON here is just a stand-in for "simple format with few types", not about it being parseable as JSON or anything." to the comment you've respond to :-)

>Your proposal here is just JSON that looks slightly different. The reason we don't have that is that we do have that, with isomorphic syntax, and we call it "JSON". There's nothing at all interesting about the idea of "JSON without commas" if you satisfy it by saying "we've eliminated the comma by relabeling it as a 'hyphen' in some cases and a 'tab' in the rest".

Hey, one should at least try to infer what people mean from context. Not everybody is a native speaker or the best communicator.

What the parent asks for, and it is interesting, and we should have had it, is basically "minimal, sane, YAML subset".

TOML is somewhat it.