Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Re: new language, arch, furth, etc.

[Mikhael Goikhman]

On 21 Jul 2004 16:28:55 +0900, Miles Bader wrote:
> 
> Zenaan Harkness <address@hidden> writes:
> >       * YAML documents are very readable by humans. 
> ....
> 
> You forgot:
> 
>   * YAML uses significant whitespace to denote structure
> 
> As one comment I found on the net put it, "YAML must be some python
> programmer's way of getting revenge on people who don't have to spend
> their coding time managing whitespace."
> 
> > "OGDL is a structured textual format that represents information in the
> > form of graphs, where the nodes are strings and the arcs or edges are
> > spaces or indentation.":
> 
> OGDL on the other hand, seems to be the perl version -- while it _also_
> features significant whitespace, that's is only one of several
> alternative syntaxes allowed...

Funny summary. :-)

I strongly agree that significant whitespace is a burden in programming.
(One should be able to freely copy/embed any program part with no change.
One should be able to write any program in one line and pass it as an
argument to the command line interpreter.)

However, significant whitespace may make sense in large range of data
representations. After all, formats like RFC822 completely rely on it.
All current arch configuration files rely on whitespace too, at least
the significant endline. I would not immediately dismiss YAML and OGDL.

This is not to deny a superiority of XL that mostly comes from all its
arch-specific built-in functions, and less from code flow statements.

Regards,
Mikhael.