3.6 "full" packages

Avi Bryant avi at beta4.com
Wed Jul 30 00:37:01 UTC 2003


On Wed, 30 Jul 2003, Richard A. O'Keefe wrote:

> tbr at mannynkapy.net (Tom Rushworth) wrote:
> 	So what about YAML (www.yaml.org)?  I expect that would be a much lighter
> 	prereq.  There are Ruby and Perl parsers available.
>
> If you just skip the Document Type Declaration, and only expand references to
> entities that you've built in (like, say, the ones in XHTML), then an XML
> parser can be a very simple thing.  Not as simple as a parser for Lisp-style
> S-expressions, but much simpler than YAML.

Right.  YAML is designed to be easy for humans, not for parsers.  The only
YAML parsers I know about are based on yacc grammars, whereas XML tools
don't tend to need to resort to a parser generator...

YAML is a nice, practical specification, though, and it would be good to
support it at some point.

Another semi-structured format I like is the old NeXT .plist.  I have a
package (PropertyList) to read this on SqueakMap.




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