On 09/03/2013 12:11, Sönke Ludwig wrote:
There has been some discussion about using a different format than JSON for the package description files. While this topic is techinically not particularily pressing, it would be good to know where to go with this early. The two candidates so far are YAML and SDL. JSON will still be supported for backwards compatibility and as the default format that is transferred over the network (package registry). The following sections list the pros/cons of each format and an example of how it could look like. My favorite so far is SDL, which was originally proposed by Nick Sabalausky, who also made a D implementation. So now I think it would be good to get some more input to get a collective opinion on this before implementing anything.
Have you considered lenient JSON as an alternative?
Lenient JSON is a loosely defined extension to JSON that allows many of
the things that would make it a more succint and clear data format. For
a description of lenient JSON, see this:
http://developer.android.com/reference/android/util/JsonReader.html#setLenient%28boolean%29
It allows these extra syntaxes:
- End of line comments starting with // or # and ending with a newline
character. - C-style comments starting with / and ending with /. Such comments
may not be nested. - Names that are unquoted or 'single quoted'.
- Strings that are unquoted or 'single quoted'.
- Array elements separated by ; instead of ,.
- Unnecessary array separators. These are interpreted as if null was
the omitted value. - Names and values separated by = or => instead of :.
- Name/value pairs separated by ; instead of ,.
Some JSON parser/readers support this functionality already, so there is
also some tool support already (although not for D).