You're both wrong. EDN is the best.

https://github.com/edn-format/edn

>You're both wrong.

Bah. How am I wrong when I haven't even claimed DSV to be the best? Just quoting that section in ESR's book does not imply I endorse or agree with it. Logic ...

Plus, just providing that EDN link is hardly proof that it is the best ... And further, "best" in many cases is subjective. You want to claim EDN is the best, you lay out an objective proof.

I get that the parent response about EDN isn't particularily enticing but you really shoild give it a look.

I do intend to. Thank you for the comment though. I had starred EDN on github just now before replying to groovy2shoes, i.e., I took an initial brief look at it. Saw a commit by richhickey (Clojure creator). Since I'm into data / file formats, I will definitely check out EDN.

Sorry, my intent (beside bringing up EDN) was to be playful. Tone is often difficult to communicate in writing. I would have stuck in a `:p` if I hadn't been on mobile, but it slipped my mind. My apologies; I did not mean to insult or to otherwise be combative or critical.

I don't have objective proof that it's the best. It's a mix of personal preference and empirical "evidence" based on past success with both EDN and its granddaddy s-expressions for data exchange and serialization.

As for why I personally like EDN so much:

1. It offers the malleability, flexibility, and extensibility of XML, while being

2. even more concise than JSON,

3. straightforward to parse, and

4. precisely defined in a rigorous and language-independent specification.

Traits 1-3 it shares with the traditional s-expressions of the Lisp family, but in contrast to s-expressions it's specifically designed as a data exchange format rather than as a lexical/syntactic format for programming languages. The reason this matters is because the traditional Lisp reader is itself extensible, and extensions can't be guaranteed to carry over from dialect to dialect or even from implementation to implementation. Many Lisp readers go so far as to even allow the execution of arbitrary code at read time, which is desirable for source code as it enables metaprogramming, but it's not so desirable when you're parsing data from an arbitrary source, due to security concerns.

While EDN does have its roots in Clojure's reader, EDN is not exactly Clojure's external representation. Rather, it's a subset of Clojure's surface syntax in much the same way that JSON is a subset of JavaScript's. Like JSON, EDN works great outside of its "native language" (in fact, I've never used EDN from Clojure itself; I've only used it from Lua, Scheme, Python, C, C++, C#, Java, and JavaScript (not necessarily in that order)).

>Sorry, my intent (beside bringing up EDN) was to be playful. Tone is often difficult to communicate in writing.

I understand, and agree it can be difficult. Thanks for clearing that up, and no worries at all. Interesting info, BTW, about EDN. Will reply again in more detail later today with any comments/questions.

I'll need some time to check out EDN, so will message you with any comments later, since this thread might expire. Thanks again for letting me know about it.

I'm also interested to hear your perspective

Cool. Will try to comment before the thread expires, then (not sure what the period is), else will post the points here as a new thread under my id (vram22).

Which Python library did you use for EDN (if any)? I had quickly googled for that, and saw a few, including one by Swaroop C H. Got any preferences? And same question for C.

Replying to myself as a way to quickly locate this lib in context:

https://github.com/swaroopch/edn_format

Sorry, I just saw this question of yours!

I was an early adopter of EDN, and wound up rolling my own parser in Python. EDN is simple enough that you can realistically roll a parser for it, complete with tests, in one or two working days. I find this to be a huge advantage—EDN doesn't really have any corner cases, so implementation is very straightforward.

No problem, and thanks for the answer.

I tried out https://github.com/swaroopch/edn_format some (in Python). Will read up more on EDN, try things a bit more, and then reply here with any comments or impressions.