[GSoC] Machine readable output from userland utilities

[Garance A Drosehn]

On 23 May 2014, at 11:38, Jos Backus wrote:

> On May 23, 2014 2:15 AM, "Alfred Perlstein" <bright at mu.org> wrote
>> point to note is that the intent is to have an output that is very
>> consumable by modern scripting languages and modules.  That would
>> very likely be JSON output.
>>
>> -Alfred
>
> I'd actually prefer YAML output. YAML is a much more expressive
> superset of JSON (YAML parsers can read JSON), but given that VHS
> beat out BetaMax, I fully expect JSON to win, and YAML to fade
> into oblivion. Sad.
>
> Jos

FWIW, I've also been interested in doing something like this in the
lpr-related programs, although I haven't had much spare time to work
on it in the last few years.  Another format which looks interesting
to me is EDN (Extensible Data Notation), from the world of
Clojure/ClojureScript.  It looks like there are modules for working
with EDN in ruby, python, and perl.

https://github.com/edn-format/edn

-- 
Garance Alistair Drosehn                =     drosih at rpi.edu
Senior Systems Programmer               or   gad at FreeBSD.org
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute;             Troy, NY;  USA