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Comment by dbcurtis | Hacker News Reader

I was hoping to like TOML, but my first experiments using a Python package for parsing it were disappointing. I found the syntax cranky, and the Python package I was using did a terrible job at providing diagnostics — very poor exception propagation.

And that seemed to be the most mature TOML parser that I could find for Python, so I decided TOML isn’t likely in my future.

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TOML is extremely verbose for lists. It’s ridiculous. Sure it had less features than YAML but it also looks considerably worse in all the common use cases. Looks like INI

Yeah, I was fighting the list problem. And not able to mix numeric and string data in a list just made the whole thing unwieldy and frustrated me.

I’ve used JSON for configs, which is not great, but at least readable. The biggest problem is lack of comments, but I added a quick hack to ignore any dictionary key starting with an octothorpe. Not ideal, but is actually handy because it makes it easy to comment out keys temporarily as well as add arbitrary commentary.

Also, the Python standard library JSON parser is very flexible and yields precise exceptions. I was able to turn those parsing exceptions into meaningful error messages with precise line and column numbers. Which came as a bit of a shock to some of my users, because a different tool written before my time but used by the same people had exactly one error message for mispelled YAML: segfault.

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