From: Robert Klemme <bob.news@...>
Date: 2006-01-25T21:03:12+09:00
Subject: Re: String#de_inspect (and Kernel#suspicious)

Erik Veenstra wrote:
>> A question: what is the advantage of this over YAML?
> 
> 1) It's faster (see below). Probably because it uses the highly
>    optimized parser/lexer/whatever of the Ruby interpreter
>    itself. (You can turn off the suspicious mode if the data
>    can be trusted, which makes it faster then YAML. If the
>    suspicious is enabled, it's as fast as YAML.)
> 
> 2) Memory (suspicious mode turned off) (see below).
> 
> 3) It's small, whereas YAML is relatively huge. (Is being small
>    an advantage? Not necessarily, but I mention it anyway...)
> 
> 4) You can store not only raw data, but code as well. (I know,
>    this is really DANGEROUS, like macros in Word. That's why I
>    introduced Kernel#suspicious.)
> 
> 5) I my real situation, I raise an exception if the line, read
>    from the journal, doesn't end with \r, \n or both. This is
>    an indication for a corrupted journal. Half a line in the
>    journal could be valid Ruby code and, as such, appear to be
>    valid data. That's why I check for the "commit". (Maybe YAML
>    does this too. I don't know.)

That's quite an impressive list.  I'm glad I asked.

Kind regards

    robert