Before we implement SDL package format for DUB

[Nick Sabalausky via Digitalmars-d]

On 8/28/2014 5:29 AM, Kagamin wrote:
> On Wednesday, 27 August 2014 at 19:30:35 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>> Besides, there's nothing stopping a good editor from taking this:
>>
>> {
>>     "tag1" : {
>>         ...blah, blah, blah, blah...
>>         ...blah, blah, blah, blah...
>>         ...blah, blah, blah, blah...
>>         ...blah, blah, blah, blah...
>>     }
>> }
>>
>> And adding helper visuals (not part of the actual document) to display
>> it as this:
>>
>> {
>>     "tag1" : {
>>         ...blah, blah, blah, blah...
>>         ...blah, blah, blah, blah...
>>         ...blah, blah, blah, blah...
>>         ...blah, blah, blah, blah...
>>     }  <i>"tag1"</i>
>> } <i>{root}</i>
>>
>> (The <i></i> wouldn't be displayed, I just put them there to indicate
>> the text inside would be visually distinguished so that the user finds
>> it obvious it's not actually part of the document. Can't really
>> emulate that in a NG post.)
>
> You just acknowledged succinct languages don't scale,

No, I've only acknowledged that they don't exhibit *perfect* scaling. 
They certainly still scale. And they can scale even better with a little 
editor help.

> and the only way
> to make them scale is to turn them into syntactical equivalent of XML
> with closing tags. And even then more verbose than XML itself. So what's
> a difference from XML if good config language still must have XML syntax?
>

The differences (off the top of my head, there may be more):

- Nobody has to actually write the closing
- Nobody had to keep the opening/closing in sync
- The closing takes up zero bytes
- Nobody has to actually look at the closing if they want to reduce the 
visual clutter: Ie, viewing it is an optional thing.

>> I don't know why no editors ever do that.
>
> The editors show only what's written and written is JSON, not JSON++.

My editor shows all sorts of stuff that ain't written. Line numbers, 
80-col mark, visible whitespace/EOLs, indent guides, a horizontal line 
to denote folded code sections, etc. You're not going to split hairs and 
claim those are fundamentally/meaningfully different from what I'm 
suggesting are you?