it seems this came up and nothing was resolved...

the latest ruby/yaml drops the default document separator so that

   y 'a' => 42

simply prints

   a : 42

vs the old

   ---
   a : 42

i have quite a bit of code which looks for '---' on stdin to determine if
input is line based or yaml.  this code all breaks with 1.8.4.  is the
document separtor doomed forever in future rubys or is this still open for
debate?

regards.

btw.  i think non-backwards compatible things like this should not make it
into minor releases.  i actually like the new behaviour but think it should be
turned on using

   module YAML
     class << self
       attr_accessor "use_document_sep"
     end
     self.use_document_sep = ENV["YAML_USE_DOCUMENT_SEP"]
   end

this way it's false by default by you can do either

   YAML::use_document_sep = true

or

   export YAML_USE_DOCUMENT_SEP=1

to turn it on.


regards.

-a
-- 
===============================================================================
| ara [dot] t [dot] howard [at] noaa [dot] gov
| strong and healthy,
| who thinks of sickness until it strikes like lightning?
| preoccupied with the world,
| who thinks of death, until it arrives like thunder?
| -- milarepa
===============================================================================