Author of the Ren page being discussed here. Didn't expect to see it on HN. :^)
The Ren site (ren-data.org) redirects there, is quite old now, and was a playground and experimental area. Hence the empty links and such.
In addition to Bolek's Humanistic repo, I had set up https://github.com/Ren-data/Ren to discuss ideas. Ren is, effectively, Redbol (Red+Rebol). One of the initial goals was to define a subset of values and normalize the syntax (Rebol never formalized its format spec), which could be shared across Redbol langs as they evolved and went in different directions. And also as a bridge for loaders in other languages. JSON has taught us that a small spec is important. The balance between simplicity and expressive value types is key.
It may come back to life at some point, but my time was better spent elsewhere for a while. I'm focused on Red now (red-lang.org). It has a native bridge feature for embedding in other langs (https://doc.red-lang.org/en/libred.html), along with a lot more. I believe there is still value in formalizing the grammar so others can create their own implementations, but it's not a priority at this time. In the meantime, you can find the active Red community at https://gitter.im/red/red to get more information and examples of what it looks like in use.
For base types, rather than a set of specific data types which is limited, how about having a standard way to indicate a type and data, like "number:12" and "rational:12/17" and "string:foo" and "date:2017-10-20" and "bitmap-hex:cafebabea2b9c0..."? Then let the reader parse it however they want given their desired interpretation of the type tag.
There could be a base set of standard types and ideally an organizational process to add more standard types -- like mimetypes. Mimetypes also might be considered included by default perhaps like "application/json; charset=utf-8:[1, 2, 3]").
It is more characters to include a type for each primitive, but it is more expandable. Likely these files will mostly be generated and read by code anyway, with humans just looking at them now and then for debugging.
If that string version seems too cluttery, another option is something like: rational:12/17 and string:foo and string:"this has spaces".
Or given possible confusion with maps and colons, another option is rational/12/17 and string/foo and string/"this has spaces" and complex/−1+3i and real:30.564 and "application/json; charset=utf-8"/[1,2,3] and maybe even xml/<foo>bar\ baz</foo> and javascript/console.log("hello") and so on.
Or maybe pipes? Like: rational|12/17 and string|foo and string|"this has spaces" and complex|−1+3i and real|30.564 and "application/json; charset=utf-8"|[1,2,3] and maybe even xml|<foo>bar\ baz</foo> and javascript|console.log("hello") and so on.
That would be a very different format. A big part of the format is that the lexical forms allow you to write things as you normally would, to another human. That does impose limits, but is part of the fundamental design.
The Ren site (ren-data.org) redirects there, is quite old now, and was a playground and experimental area. Hence the empty links and such.
In addition to Bolek's Humanistic repo, I had set up https://github.com/Ren-data/Ren to discuss ideas. Ren is, effectively, Redbol (Red+Rebol). One of the initial goals was to define a subset of values and normalize the syntax (Rebol never formalized its format spec), which could be shared across Redbol langs as they evolved and went in different directions. And also as a bridge for loaders in other languages. JSON has taught us that a small spec is important. The balance between simplicity and expressive value types is key.
It may come back to life at some point, but my time was better spent elsewhere for a while. I'm focused on Red now (red-lang.org). It has a native bridge feature for embedding in other langs (https://doc.red-lang.org/en/libred.html), along with a lot more. I believe there is still value in formalizing the grammar so others can create their own implementations, but it's not a priority at this time. In the meantime, you can find the active Red community at https://gitter.im/red/red to get more information and examples of what it looks like in use.
Cheers.