SDLang – Simple Declarative Language

https://sdlang.org/

by smartmic • 4 years ago

75 33 4 years ago

sdlang.org

christophilus• 4 years ago

Not bad. I prefer edn, but this is certainly an improvement over, say, JSON.

conaclos2• 4 years ago

Some link to share about EDN?

hobo_mark• 4 years ago

Appears to be this https://github.com/edn-format/edn

ebingdom2• 4 years ago

Looks interesting, but does it offer any unique features that set it apart from other such languages like JSON, XML, etc.? I see that matrix example, but is it any different from an array? (I couldn't tell from reading the docs.)

akvadrako• 4 years ago

Unlike JSON and XML its designed to be human readable and writable. It's more like a better YAML.

dkersten• 4 years ago

So its a competitor to TOML? (or TOML to it, I dunno when this was created)

nileshtrivedi• 4 years ago

JSON5 might be a good candidate for these attributes.

kjeetgill• 4 years ago

I hear this not-for-human comment so often, I really have to second mrtweetyhack's now dead comment and this one. When did this meme start making the rounds?

JSON especially is incredibly human read/writeable and its relative lack of ambiguity is nearly unparalleled., and it's syntax is minicule. YAML is particularly bad in this regard. XML is usually pretty humanly readable, editable too, and has many fewer of the issues around ambiguity, but I sympathize with the sentiment since it can get's out of hand much more readily.

bzxcvbn3• 4 years ago

Since when are json or XML not human readable or writable?

bzxcvbn3• 4 years ago

Since when are json or XML not human readable or writable?

ebingdom2• 4 years ago

Did you reply to the wrong comment?

quag• 4 years ago

KDL is a variant of SDLang that’s worth checking out.

https://github.com/kdl-org/kdl

sinistersnare• 4 years ago

Having `true/false/on/off/null`, 4 different comment styles and 5 numerical types screams anything except for 'Simple' to me.

It may be a fine language, but it seems like it needs a new name. Maybe 'YAYAML' to highlighting its complexity.

avgcorrection• 4 years ago

I guess they mean simple syntax.

duped• 4 years ago

Null is very different than true and false, equivalence is really frustrating to deal with.

disconcision• 4 years ago

k.d. lang, for komplex declarative language

joshmarinacci• 4 years ago

What’s the story on error handling? This has been the downfall of a lot of structured text formats.

layer83• 4 years ago

It seems like the date/time format is ambiguous, since a date followed by a time could be interpreted either as a single date-time value or a date value followed by a time value.

joe_the_user2• 4 years ago

Date/time specification is incredibly hard. However hard you think it is, it's actually a "little" harder.[1]

I'd guess that someone formulating their own date/time format is actually evidence that they don't understand what a problem it is and so their format is wrong.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_formatting_and_storage_bu...

layer83• 4 years ago

In the present case the problem is solely related to using whitespace both as a value separator and also within a value, where both “halves” of the value are also valid values in their own right. It would have been similar if they defined a complex-number type whose syntax consists of the real and imaginary part just being separated by whitespace. The issue has nothing to do with the conceptual particularities of date and time.

spicybright2• 4 years ago

It doesn't seem worth it to figure out time/date representation at the data layer like this.

Rigid definition of time stamps leads to incompatible parsers and risks if you need to update how the timestamp works.

Or, store it as a string and deal with it after parsing.

The latter one always wins, hence json's popularity.

Baking it into the data format isn't going to make people treat timestamps right. Probably will do the opposite, really.

dmitriid• 4 years ago

Why people insist on not using ISO 8601 (or a subset of it) is beyond me.

kaetemi• 4 years ago

This looks clean and very readable. How's the experience on the programming side, though?

hatf0• 4 years ago

As a user of SDLang.. not a huge fan of it, IMO. Dub (the D package manager) uses SDLang as one of the two formats that you can use to configure projects (those two being SDLang and JSON), and I often find myself converting every project to using the JSON format as there is virtually no tooling (in most languages) for parsing SDLang. I've recently started using TOML instead, and I have nothing but good things to say about it.

syrrim• 4 years ago

Is just the tooling the problem, or have you run into other issues?

bitbckt• 4 years ago

I’m no fan of JSON as a configuration language, but I tried using SDLang with dub and quickly returned to JSON.

Dub would feel slightly (slightly!) more polished if it used a more common package format. TOML would be a good choice.

spicybright2• 4 years ago

I honestly don't know why people don't adopt a slightly better json at this point if we're going to invent weird new formats anyways. Some kind of macro language with better syntax would be ahead by miles, and able to plug into anywhere that uses JSON very easily.

conaclos2• 4 years ago

For interested readers, EKON [1] proposes yet-another interesting superset for JSON.

[1] https://github.com/ekon-org/ekon

hamstergene• 4 years ago

I like this kind of syntax because it is a lot like how my ad-hoc print/log statements have been printing structured data all along.

For a generic data language, SDLang has some oddly specific features: distinction between 32-bit and 64-bit integers, single and double floats, arbitrary strings and base64, 3 single-line comment styles, multiple ways to say booleans.

Smells like leaky abstraction, as if the author has ingrained some requirements of the project they've been working on into SDLang rather implementing them in project-specific code.

Another commenter has linked KDL language which seems to have cleaner design, and can even satisfy more typing use cases than SDLang.

fuzzythinker• 4 years ago

Wow, unbelievable timing. Was just looking for such spec language. Looking at related ones like libucl, dhall, metadesk, edn, toml. This and KDL as pointed out by @quag seem to fit my needs much better. Thank you both!

SDLang – Simple Declarative Language

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