Re: [Yaml-core] Tabular Data Sets (a brain fart)

[Clark C. E. <cc...@cl...>]

On Mon, Dec 13, 2004 at 08:23:14PM +0200, Oren Ben-Kiki wrote:
| I've checked-in a reasonable CVS version of the draft

Which repository? SF.NET?

| >   1. A very nice "presentation" tabular form (that would not
| >      be great for editing since columns wouldn't line up).
| 
| As Tim pointed out, this:
| 
|  - [Dysmorphology ,                       , Physical Examination ]
|  - [Acondroplasia , Marfan Syndrome , ... , Height , Weight , ...]
|  - [Not Evaluated , Positive        , ... ,  63    , 130    , ...]

Not the same... this is a sequences of sequences.  I'm looking
for a nice syntax for sequences of _mappings_  ;)

| Of course, if you want a tabular syntax to express a sequence of 
| mappings, well, that's a whole separate issue.

Yes, that's the issue -- sequences of mappings, aka lists of
objects, when the set of keys is heavily repeating is just an
eyesore. Someting like what I orginal posted would be nice...

>     ---
>     | name         | hr | ave
>     |--------------+----+------
>     | Mark McGwire | 65 | 0.278
>     | Sammy Sosa   | 63 | 0.288 
>     ...
> 
> This particular structure would then be equivalent to 
> example 2.4 in the specification,
> 
>     ---
>     -
>       name: Mark McGwire
>       hr:   65
>       avg:  0.278
>     -
>       name: Sammy Sosa
>       hr:   63
>       avg:  0.288
>     ...

...

| It seems to me that 
| defining exactly how CSV (or CSV-like) column headers get converted to 
| nested mapping keys would be a huge PITA.

I'm really not that concerned about CVS compatibility - really!

| What GUI people would want is two menu entries: "export to yaml" and 
| "import from yaml" 
...
| CLI people, being CLI people, would have no problem using csv2yaml and 
| yaml2csv, and in fact would probably prefer it that way :-)
...
| I don't see that the set of users who need to cut&paste text in notepad 
| from a csv to YAML is that large... It just doesn't seem to justify the 
| effort (and un-yaml-ness) required.

Right.  I'm sold, CVS-in-YAML is a _bad_ idea.  However, I still
have a ton of YAML data that is tabular (and modeled in my 
programming languages as a sequence of mappings).   I'd like a
nice clean way to express this, and it'd be nice if it allowed
for "pivot table" like format...

>         ---
>         | player       | stastic
>         |              | hr | ave
>         |--------------+----+------
>         | Mark McGwire | 65 | 0.278
>         | Sammy Sosa   | 63 | 0.288 
>         ...
> 
>      being mapped to...
> 
>         ---
>         -
>           player: Mark McGwire
>           stastic:
>             hr:   65
>             avg:  0.278
>         -
>           player: Sammy Sosa
>           stastic:
>             hr:   63
>             avg:  0.288
>         ...

Now that would make alot of my YAML data _super_ nice to read!
But that said, if we have a nice syntax we can add this later...
that's good 'enuff for now.

Best,

Clark