YAML: Probably not so great after all

Re:YAML: Probably not so great after all by zenexer on Sunday August 18, 2019 @07:57PM (#20733745)

They’re fairly useful in applications that use numeric IDs. For example, if I’m using SQL, and I have a table with an AUTOINCREMENT primary key, I’m going to have a lot of numeric IDs. If I want to reference these in a config file of some kind, I don’t want to have to read them as strings and handle the parsing on my end.

Even if you’re of the opinion that IDs shouldn’t be numeric, there are a lot of cases where you’re stuck with integers—on Linux, user IDs, group IDs, and inodes are just a few examples.

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Re:YAML: Probably not so great after all by crdoconnor on Sunday August 18, 2019 @08:12PM (#20733821)

Ah I see, yes that makes perfect sense. I've used integer keys too. Sorry, I thought by non-string you meant non-scalar - i.e. the idea of using lists as keys (allowed in YAML).

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Re:YAML: Probably not so great after all by zbentley on Sunday August 18, 2019 @09:09PM (#20734100)

I think they did mean nonscalar keys. Say I have a compoubd primary key in a database, over 3 columns. In YAML, representing that key as an array of the three columns' values (or a map from column name to value) makes sense, and so does using that as a key in other maps.

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