[shahsyed]

You're partially kidding but you're 100% right.

Someone in another thread mentioned using some LISP or LISP-like language to solve this problem.

Would something like TOML make things better here?

What would have been the solution?

[rgoulter]

Dhall is an example of a configuration language. Its programs must terminate. It aims for safety, claiming that it can support safe evaluation of untrusted code. https://dhall-lang.org/

TBH, I have no experience with it. But, it sounds like if you need a configuration language with programmatic features, it would be more suited to the job than a general purpose programming language.

[pjmlp]

XML, but I guess I won't get many friends for asserting that.

[juped]

I really regret disliking XML all those years ago, now that I've seen the alternative.

[secondcoming]

Nope. Json has schema validation too, and every language has a json parser

[pjmlp]

JSON doesn't do comments.

[secondcoming]

Not officially, but it's fakeable

[pjmlp]

Which for me is a design smell, why bother with workarounds when XML already offers me all the best tooling out of the box.

[secondcoming]

For me, xml is just too much, and when working with C or C++ (not t sure about rust) it's just a pain. Can your json schema file not serve as the documentation?

[jayd16]

If something like k8s implemented comments as specific comment fields that would actually be pretty useful. The fields could be parsed and show in GUIs.

[secondcoming]

That is the workaround, just add it as "comment":"comment text". Having one comment for each field in an object would get unwieldy though. Anther place for them is possibly in the json schema file.

[jiangplus]

Then use HTML and extend the functionality with JSX

[pjmlp]

Useless work when XML already has all the tooling available and battle tested in production.