I am kind of disturbed by where this Inline Collection is taking us. It
seems to be taking us down a road of reinventing our language which is
not what we are supposed to be doing.
I thought that the original idea was to come up with a way to more
handily specify short collections inline. I agree that something for
that purpose would be nice.
Now we are trying to extend it to multiple lines and do much larger
things with it. And that has led us into the trap of trying to back
integrate the new concept with the old to provide a new unified way of
doing this.
That sucks. And here's why. YAML is *based* on using indentation for
structure. That's its greatest strength. We've really leveraged the
indentation thing extremely successfully so far.
Now we are trying to come up with a syntax for using structure without
indentation. We are punting our greatest strength for a few
optimizations.
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OK. So to continue being constructive, how about this:
Let's start with the premise that Inline Collections will be precisely
that, *inline*. In other words, they will start on the same line, and
not use more than one line.
I'll leave it at that for now. I think that premise will keep us within
the scope of the original intent. Let's see what we can come up with.
Cheers, Brian
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