On Thu, 14 Mar 2013 01:15:28 GMT
"Jonathan M Davis" jmdavisprog@gmx.com wrote:

I confess that I detest yaml due to the fact that it's whitespace
sensitive. json is far superior IMHO. As for SDL, the format seems a
bit off to me due to the complete lack of separators or delimiters on
most lines,

FWIW, SDL is a newline-terminated format with \ as a line-continuation
operator). Whitespace separates tokens. Names (when a tag isn't
anonymous) are identifiers (ie cannot have embedded whitespace) and are
the first token on a line. Any following tokens (if any) are values (and
then optionally Name=Value attributes, and then optionally a
block of children).

Don't know if that helps, but thought I'd point it out in case it
clarifies anything.

My vote, of course, goes for SDL. But as I'm the one who wrote the D
implementation, I could be considered biased ;)

I think that one key thing to remember is that if dub is trying to
become D's official package manager, it can't rely on external
libraries for anything (except for the standard library). So, any
package format that it supports either needs to be parseable with
Phobos or with dub's own code. json is the only one of the three
that's currently in Phobos (though std.json does need an overhaul).
So, if dub goes with SDL (or yaml), it either needs to an SDL parser
internally, or an SDL parser needs to be added to Phobos (though it's
quite possible that one could be used internally and then added to
Phobos later).

That's a good point. To that end:

  • DUB hereby has my full permission to steal/adapt/whatever any or all
    of my D SDL implementation. If it does so, then I'm willing to
    maintain DUB's internal copy of SDLang-D if Sonke would like.
  • It has always been my intent to offer SDLang-D to Phobos as a
    possible "std.sdlang". I just want to improve the API first, though.