[simonrepp]

tl;dr: Another alternative to YAML (among many great others), this one designed and developed by me:

https://eno-lang.org/

I've been doing a lot of research and development on language design for file-based content (e.g. for static site generators). I've found that YAML - although established as the go-to format for statically generated blogs, etc. - was never designed for these things as it by its nature does not support simple, essential features for this usecase like for instance unindented blocks of verbatim text (for which YAML frontmatter was invented as a very limited hack).

The result of all this R&D is a language called "eno notation" which is designed especially for file-based content usecases, and around which I've also built an entire ecosystem for many languages and editors - if you're working in that field, it might be worth taking a look!

[roryokane]

I find it surprising that your format doesn’t distinguish strings and numbers, or other types of scalar values in general. For example, in your demo “eno's javascript benchmark suite data” on https://eno-lang.org/eno/demos/, both of these lines:

  iterations: 100000
  evaluated: Fri Jul 06 2018 09:46:48 GMT+0200 (Central European Summer Time)

are tagged below as just a “Field”. Do client programs that read an Eno file need to run `int()`/`float()` or `.to_i`/`.to_f` on the field values they know should be numbers? That seems unergonomic.

[simonrepp]

You are correct! The thinking behind this is that for the majority of file-based configuration and content usecases the expected types are fixed and known beforehand already - ergo it makes more sense that a developer has to specify once which type a field is (gaining in return 100% type safety, validation, localized validation messages, ...) than all users later having to e.g. explicitly write quotes a million times when writing configuration/content, just to tell the application something about the type it already knows anyway (and wouldn't expect/accept any other way too). I think this is really more ergonomic, even in the short run.