Arrays as objects

[conartist6]

I was surprised that the usage examples prominently feature several examples which use arrays as if they were objects...

If KDL was translated to JSON the example code would be showing ['key1', 'value1', 'key2', 'value2']. This is never mentioned as being supported semantically anywhere that I can find, so I can only assume that it's as non-semantic in KDL as it would be in JSON. Am I incorrect about this? Why would an unsupported usage pattern be featured so prominently?

Edit: I see now that I was wrong about ['key1', 'value1', 'key2', 'value2']. It's more like [['key1', ['value1']], ['key2', ['value2']]]].

[NoahTheDuke]

Which code example are you talking about?

[conartist6]

Top of the front page:

package {
  name my-pkg
  version "1.2.3"

  dependencies {
    // Nodes can have standalone values as well as
    // key/value pairs.
    lodash "^3.2.1" optional=#true alias=underscore
  }
}

[conartist6]

It just looks so much like a Javascript package.json! The content is that of a package manifest. It's even got the curly braces wrapped around a bunch of what the reader understands to be key-value pairs. my-package is clearly the value for the key name and "1.2.3" is clearly the specific version which the person who wrote this file expects to be located by finding the version key. That was why I was so surprised when I read the docs and found that those weren't actually key-value mappings in the eyes of the language's formal specification.

[tabatkins]

You have that about right, which is confusing me why you're confused. ^_^

In most cases, KDL nodes do serve a very similar purpose to k/v pairs in JSON. In this example, the name node has a single attribute, as does the version node, and you can think of the dependencies node as having an "object" value. It's just the lodash node that has some more complex values that don't translate directly to JSON, because KDL's nodes are a richer data structure than JSON's object/array split.

(Tho, if the lodash node were changed to lodash version="^3.2.1" optional=#true alias=underscore, then the entire document would be valid JSON-in-KDL, equivalent to the JSON document:

{
  "name": "my-pkg",
  "version": "1.2.3",
  "dependencies": {
    "lodash": {
      "version": "^3.2.1",
      "optional": true,
      "alias": "underscore"
    }
  }
}