did i mention style is everything?

a.rb

#
# perl got some things right.  here-docs were one of them.  YAML takes this
# further when we have to define large data structures.
#
# if you find yourself typing " ' ) ( [ ] too many times in a row, whack
# yourself on the wee-wee with a keyboard and whip out the YAML
#

  this_fucking_licks_hairy_balls_to_edit =

    [{"name"=>"Ara T. Howard", "email"=>"[email protected]"},
     {"name"=>"Ryan Cook", "email"=>"[email protected]"},
     {"name"=>"Garett Shulman", "email"=>"[email protected]"}]


  and_this_does_not =

    YAML.parse '
      -
        name  : Ara T. Howard
        email : [email protected]

      -
        name  : Ryan Cook
        email : [email protected]

      -
        name  : Garett Shulman
        email : [email protected]

    '

Given that there are some really weird fetishes out there, I'm almost certain that someone out there actually enjoys licking hairy balls. But I appreciate the sentiment. (=

@geeksam - touché

replacing the typing of " ' ) ( [ ] for the hellish editing of YAML and all its white spaces glory doesn't seem like a good trade off.

@Telmo - whitespace is hell. but giant structures, as you might put into mongo, require something else.

My favored approach

[ {
  "name"  => "Ara T. Howard",
  "email" => "[email protected]"
}, {
  "name"  => "Ryan Cook",
  "email" => "[email protected]"
}, {
  "name"  => "Garett Shulman",
  "email" => "[email protected]"
} ]

I like this because it is pure ruby, and it closely resembles JSON (which is parseable enough by humans).

moving the code lines separate from the delims is nice for editing....

I tend to separate the delimiters even more, but that's probably just because TextMate's native indentation support isn't as robust as I wish it were.

I also tend to add a trailing comma after all hash or array entries, even the last one (Some of my coworkers took to calling it "the Livingston-Gray comma"). I like to reorder large hashes to group related keys together, and it sucks to wait 10 seconds for Rails to load and then get hit with a syntax error because I moved the last item up and forgot to add the comma. ;>