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Comment by burke | Hacker News Reader

> YAML expresses structure through whitespace. Significant whitespace is a common source of mistakes that we shouldn't have to deal with.

> Both HOCON and YAML make the mistake of implementing too many features (like anchors, sustitutions or concatenation).

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But this too has significant whitespace, acting as a comma in separating properties. (It's not clear whether you can mix commas and whitespace here.)

Also this claims to not need escapes, but it's also not clear how this format handles a comma or a newline in strings without escaping, do they act as a comma to separate properties or do they act as natural commas/newlines?

Only quoteless strings have no escapes, and according to the docs the rule is:

  > quoteless strings include everything up to the end of the
  > line, excluding trailing whitespace.

(edit: formatting)

So this

{

  foo:one,

  bar:two

}

Parses to "one," because it is a quoteless string?

What about true and false, is false the boolean constant or a unquoted string "false".

I posted this in another thread here, but it's documented in the linked page:

  > A value that is a number, true, false or null in JSON is parsed as a value.
  > E.g. '3' is a valid number while '3 times' is a string.

>YAML make the mistake of implementing too many features (like anchors, sustitutions)

That's why I remove those features.

Significant whitespace is a normal complaint for beginners in python too, but most people prefer it in the end.

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