[Yaml-core] RE: Meeting Minutes

[Oren Ben-K. <or...@ri...>]

I wrote:
> > >        This difference emerged after Brian gave the
> > >        use case of putting a regular expression
> > >        as a value.  Clark's answer was "too bad",
> > >        (a) use a multi-line scalar, or (b) quote
> > >        the regular expression, or (c) let's introduce
> > >        an implict "regex" type starting with the ` tick.
> 
> Oh, just find some prefix to attach to regexps and be done with...

Silly me, I completely missed the point - I thought you were talking about
regexp as an implicit type, while you meant "a string value containing a
regexp".

Hmmm. The one-line block syntax makes some sense for that, but consider
that:

regexp: !text ... line noise here ...

Is currently a legal way of doing this. I think "line noise as text value"
is rare enough that an explicit '!text' annotation is acceptable (even in
Perl :-). The in-line block syntax seems more trouble than it is worth.

My proposal for changing the reference syntax from '*' to '->' still stands,
however. You may have noted I changed the base64 syntax from [...data...] to
[=...data...=], due to the same reason: using a single prefix character is
like using a type A IP network or a TLD; it should only be done for an
extremely good reason.

I feel '=' is a case where a one-char type is acceptable, and also '~'. Both
are actually single-char values rather than a single-char prefixes; so in
theory '~/=...data...' implicit types could still be used, though of course
their relationship with '='/'~' would become an issue. At any rate, I would
definitely draw the line there. Wasting '*' seems like, well, a waste :-)
Besides, '->' may be more readable to a newbie.

Have fun,

    Oren Ben-Kiki