Thanks for the followups, gang.

Yes, I have my own modified version of PyYaml to make it conform to the
latest Ruby implemention.  (I haven't done this for the Perl YAML
module yet.)  The immediate issue is that for certain reasons I can't
update the modules system-wide and so I was looking for a quick and
easy user-script solution; like throwing in some re-definitions,
overrides, or extensions to force in some backwards compatability and
something I can throw in a library or with a switch.

Quoting the flagged words does the right thing (forces them to be
strings) and pre/post processing all Python and Perl generated Yaml
docs has been a stop-gap measure but is clumsy or not convenient.

Anyhow, thanks very much Daz.  I will test out your method.  /salute