Draft PEP on RSON configuration file format

[Steve Howell]

On Mar 4, 9:36 pm, Gregory Ewing <greg.ew... at canterbury.ac.nz> wrote:
> Paul Rubin wrote:
> > ReST was another solution in search of a problem.
>
> I think the basic idea behind ReST is quite good, i.e.
> understanding as markup various typographical conventions
> that make sense in plain text, such as underlined
> headings, bullets, numbered paragraphs.
>
> Unfortunately it went overboard with a slew of cryptic
> codes for footnotes, hyperlinks, etc. that nobody would
> naturally think to use in a plain text document.
>

The same thing happened with YAML to a certain extent, from my
perspective.  YAML was never meant to be an exact alternative to XML,
but its basic premise was sound--use indentation for more elegant
syntax, and model its semantics more toward how data actually gets
used internally by scripting languages in particular.  But there is
also some featuritis with YAML that makes it hard to digest and
needlessly cumbersome to implement.

JSON is not perfect by any means, but I consider it to be a more
useful descendant of XML and YAML, even if it did not directly borrow
from either.  (YAML and JSON are certainly similar, but that could be
a coincidental convergence.)  Even if YAML itself has not been a
resounding success, it set the bar to a certain degree.