Toml: Tom's Obvious, Minimal Language

Post by mlthoughts2018 » Fri, Jul 13, 2018, 5:53 PM UTC

agumonkey wrote: post #77

mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This JSON is vastly more readable, frankly. It’s so clear what container type “designers” refers to, and I can read directly what data structures the elements are. I can’t do that in Toml. Unless I just happen to remember some rote memorized convention for what the syntax unpacks into, there’s no way to tell by looking at Toml code. IMO this ought to be priority number one for any utility language like this. No matte…

Nesting has locality value, which is often desireable.. but as I said, the [[toml]] syntax yields open arrays, it seems you can define thing in multiple passes (which can be harmful but may also be a need once in a while)

Post by DonHopkins » Fri, Jul 13, 2018, 6:21 PM UTC

mojombo wrote: post #10

Hey, Tom here (creator of TOML). Fun to see TOML on HN again! Since I first wrote a (mostly) joke proposal for TOML 5 years ago, TOML has been adopted by a number of prominent projects such as Cargo, Hugo, Pipenv, and others. TOML is especially well suited for projects that need a simple configuration file that maps unambiguously to a hash table. There are still some weaknesses in TOML that make it non-optimal for la…

Post by Pxtl » Fri, Jul 13, 2018, 6:26 PM UTC

losvedir wrote: post #80

I just started a rust project and so had to learn TOML since that's what the package manager (and a lot of the ecosystem) uses. For some reason, though, I just struggle with the syntax. It says it's "obvious" but it wasn't to me. I think it says something that the README is full of "this TOML would be represented like this JSON", to help you understand what's going on. Every time I saw that, I was like "oh, now I get…

Post by chipotle_coyote » Fri, Jul 13, 2018, 6:44 PM UTC

mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #66

gnuvince wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An array of dictionaries. In JSON, my example becomes: { "designers": [ {"name": "Guido", "lang": "Python"}, {"name": "Larry", "lang": "Perl"} ] }

This JSON is vastly more readable, frankly. It’s so clear what container type “designers” refers to, and I can read directly what data structures the elements are. I can’t do that in Toml. Unless I just happen to remember some rote memorized convention for what the syntax unpacks into, there’s no way to tell by looking at Toml code. IMO this ought to be priority number one for any utility language like this. No matte…

    [site]
    name = "My Great Website"
    url = "https://example.com"
    author = "Watts Martin"
    email = "foo@bar.com"
    links = [
      { name = "tom", url = "http://tom.example.com" },
      { name = "bob", url = "http://bob.example.com" }
    ]

    [database]
    server = "localhost"
    username = "dbuser"
    password = "dbpassword"

    {
      "site": {
        "name": "My Great Website",
        "url": "https://example.com",
        "author": "Watts Martin",
        "email": "foo@bar.com",
        "links": [
          { "name": "tom", "url": "http://tom.example.com" },
          { "name": "bob", "url": "http://bob.example.com" }
        ]
      },
      "database": {
        "server": "localhost",
        "username": "dbuser",
        "password": "dbpassword"
      }
    }

    site:
      name: My Great Website
      url: 'https://example.com'
      author: Watts Martin
      email: foo@bar.com
      links:
        - name: tom
          url: 'http://tom.example.com'
        - name: bob
          url: 'http://bob.example.com'
    database:
      server: localhost
      username: dbuser
      password: dbpassword

Post by curun1r » Fri, Jul 13, 2018, 7:21 PM UTC

bqe wrote: post #71

nixpulvis wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Yea the goal would be some kind of validation at parsing time. I'm not super familiar with TOML parsing, but there must be error cases in the implementations, so it seems like using `\` on UNIX systems, for example could return an error. The only hard part about this I see is distinguishing paths from strings syntactically without making TOML overly complex. 2. So basically, the majority of people don't want to ty…

Backslashes are valid characters in a POSIX filesystem, but they don't indicate a directory.