What YAML engine do you use?

[Reinhold Birkenfeld]

A.M. Kuchling wrote:
> On Fri, 21 Jan 2005 18:54:50 +0100, 
> 	Fredrik Lundh <fredrik at pythonware.com> wrote:
>> judging from http://yaml.org/spec/current.html (750k), the YAML designers are
>> clearly insane.  that's the most absurd software specification I've ever seen.  they
>> need help, not users.
> 
> IMHO that's a bit extreme.  Specifications are written to be detailed, so
> consequently they're torture to read.  Seen the ReStructured Text spec
> lately?

Agreed. If you just want to use it, you don't need the spec anyway.

> The basic idea -- a data dumping format that's human-readable -- isn't a bad
> one.  OTOH, I can't recall wanting such a thing -- when I want readable
> output I'm happy using
> unreadable pickle files, unpickling the object and calling a .dump() or
> .as_text() method.)
> 
> But YAML seems to have started out with the goal of being human-writable,
> something you would write in Emacs,

Exactly. I use it as a format for config files the user can edit
directly without much thinking (the explanation on top of the file are 3
lines).

> and that seems to have gotten lost; the
> format is now just as complicated as Restructured Text, but more cryptic
> (the URI namespacing for tags, for example), not really simpler than
> XML and in some ways weaker (e.g. only two encodings supported, more
> complicated escaping rules).

In most cases you don't need the complicated things, and the
http://www.yaml.org/refcard.html isn't very complex either.

Reinhold