Assuming your YAML is correct, there will never be a confusion between 'the second item from the section named servers' and 'the section named 2'. The reason for this is that the value at 'dbconfig.servers' is either a scalar, a hash ref, or an array ref, so assuming it is not a scalar, it has to be one of the two - not ambiguous.

The YAML in question will be a config file, which means it's likely that it will be created by a hand by a person -- and not auto generated by code, so assuming it is "correct" is a bad assumption. Frankly I can't possibly imagine how you can consider that syntax unambiguous: you tell me, is "a.b.2.3" referring to $conf->{'a'}->{'b'}->{'2'}->{'3'} or $conf->{'a'}->{'b'}->[2]->[3] ?

...because you're working with configuration data, you generally know what it looks like before you run the program. It's not the same as (eg) parsing user submitted data from a website.

You may know what the data looks like, because you wrote the config parsing module, and the config files, and the apps that use the config parsing module. Joe Blo who writes an app using your module may not understand it as well, and John Smith who uses Joe Blo's app and needs to write the config files for it REALLY may not understand what's going on.

In practice, it is really easy to use ... the only slight annoyance being that you have to create a file as follows ... Then you load the data once (eg for mod_perl, in startup.pl) ... Then for any module that needs access to the config, you just add this to module file

That does not sound easy to use ... particularly the part about having to create a seperate mini little perl module for each config dir i want to read from, or the fact that i have to use the module one way in exactly one palce in my app, but every other place in my app i have to use it a different way.

In reply to Re^3: RFC: A YAML config module to be posted to CPAN by hossman
in thread RFC: A YAML config module to be posted to CPAN by clinton

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