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Comment by R0flcopt3r | Hacker News Reader

What is the "Norway problem"?

“The Norway Problem” YAML has: when you abbreviate Norway to its ISO 3166-1 ALPHA-2 form NO, YAML will return false when parsing list of countries f.e ‘[GB, IN, NO,…]’

It's a good example of how you can overengineer a relatively simple format.

The reason is that they specify a boolean value as either "true/false" or "yes/no".

The last alternative causes problems not only for the Norwegian country code (no), but also in cases where you need to specify the actual word "yes"

You could of course end up with the same problem if you need to specify the literal "true" and "false", but by overengineering the acceptable boolean values, they increase the potential problem areas.

Claiming more common words as keywords basically. It's just not well considered. true and false are ordinary words, and it would probably be better if sometime way back someone had come up with special keywords that didn't conflict with ordinary words, but for good or bad, at least by now it's practically universal in most languages that true & false are keywords and everyone knows it. Claiming yes and no as keywords also was just thoughtless and inconsiderate (ok that was redundant), doubly so when they don't even do a new job but simply double the consumed namespace to do the same job that was already done by true & false.

Eh, it's fine if they're keywords as long as not everything is a string. If `"NO"` and `NO` are distinct types, then they're not equal and there's no Norway problem. YAML treats strings, numbers, null, and booleans as all the same type (scalars). The problem isn't keywords clashing with common words, it's not having distinct types!

There's even more options apparently :)

A Boolean represents a true/false value. Booleans are formatted as English words (“true”/“false”, “yes”/“no” or “on”/“off”) for readability and may be abbreviated as a single character “y”/“n” or “Y”/“N”.

Regexp: y|Y|yes|Yes|YES|n|N|no|No|NO|true|True|TRUE|false|False|FALSE|on|On|ON|off|Off|OFF

(https://yaml.org/type/bool.html)

To be fair, yaml has a form of inheritance, I wouldn't define it a relatively simple format

To be fair, YAML 1.2 does not suffer from the "Norway Problem", but YAML is still a rather complex format.

I feel like the Makefile syntax has some pesky warts, like not breaking when there are spaces in filenames, requiring tabs[1], the ceremony around PHONY targets... If you take the legacy stuff out of make,

[1] Apparently it can be fixed with a complex .RECIPEPREFIX incantation which behaves differently in different versions of GNU make, and was conveniently added just one minor version after Apple has graciously decided to stop updating all their GNU software versions.

Redo, ninja and tup seems like trying to do that, with their own twists, but none of them really managed to nudge make out;

I use make for (among other things) transforming files; batch compression being the simplest example, so all one requires is a rule saying %.log.xz : %.log and all is well.

But if people have colons in filenames, for example for timestamps, all bets are off, and make chokes spectacularly.

And that really sucks in Windows because every absolute path contains a colon. Not that absolute paths are common in makefiles, but it's not something that should break on a major platform.

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