Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Kuyawa 1168 days ago
I remember one time designing the simplest and most readable data format ever and came up with Dixy [0] after removing all I could and still make it usable

I'm leaving it here because it will never be used for anything but at least it may inspire somebody design a better format with simplicity in mind

[0] https://github.com/kuyawa/Dixy

3 comments

This looks a lot like YAML, especially with the non-quoted strings, colons, and indentation. It also seems to share the problems of YAML, namely a very non-uniform syntax. For example, how do you distinguish null (denoted as "?") from a literal string containing one question mark? How do you distinguish the number 1 from the string "1"? Hence why I'm not a fan of both YAML and Dixy.

Other problems to ponder: Is 0 different from 00? Is "1, 2, 3, 4" different from "1,2,3,4"? Is "a: b" different from "a : b" and "a:b"?

I like this! It's like YAML but you can learn the entire spec in 15 seconds.
Why will it never be used for any thing? I like it. Thank you for sharing.