On: TOML: Tom's Obvious Minimal Language

[pachico]

My main issue with TOML is precisely described in the homepage example:

[servers]

[servers.alpha]

is error prone. An sub heading shouldn't need to know about its parent, much less to have to copy it entirely.

[pphysch → pachico]

But then you need new syntax to indicate subheadings, which is also (probably less) error prone because you might omit it.

[ryan-duve → pachico]

I think it is not needed? Or did you mean something other than this?

    Python 3.11.3 (main, May  4 2023, 05:53:32) [GCC 10.2.1 20210110]
    Type 'copyright', 'credits' or 'license' for more information
    IPython 8.13.2 -- An enhanced Interactive Python. Type '?' for help.
    
    In [1]: !cat /tmp/x.toml
    [servers.alpha]
    x = 10
    
    In [2]: import tomllib
       ...: 
       ...: with open("/tmp/x.toml", "rb") as f:
       ...:     t = tomllib.load(f)
       ...: 
       ...: t
    Out[2]: {'servers': {'alpha': {'x': 10}}}

[petre → pachico]

How do you convert it into a nested object then? You could use deeply nested objects like JSON or YAML does, but then it defeats the purpose of an easy to read configuration format. This is also a feature of Java property files.

[mdaniel → petre]

> This is also a feature of Java property files.

To the very best of my knowledge, Properties are merely Map<String,String> (see: https://docs.oracle.com/en/java/javase/11/docs/api/java.base... ) and any subsequent interpretation happens in the application (e.g. Spring treating `foo[1]=bar` as a list-ish assignment but the actual key returned from `getProperty` is the string literal as written `foo[1]`)