> I think that would cause surprise type conversions.
YAML has traditionally been used as the basis of higher-level configuration files for particular applications. What I'm saying is that implicit typing should be permitted, but delegated to those applications.
Conversely, I'm not saying that StrictYAML should do anything by default with unquoted values, except reporting them to the application as being an unquoted value. This way the application could choose to process the value differently from those that are quoted.
An interesting idea, but it's not clear that this will be less confusing or that application authors will make better at avoiding config languages gotchas than config language designers such as yourself (and existing app specific config languages suggest otherwise).
I think a reason this won't necessarily fix the problem with unmet expectations is that identical constructs in different but analogous yaml files would be likely to end up with very different semantics and users effectively have to remember which particular idiosyncratic YAML dialect choices various apps make. Say
version: 1.3
means the string "1.3" in app a), the float 1.3 in app b) and a version number in app c) one. Furthermore let's assume that app c) required a version number, whereas a) and b) required strings.
Another, more subtle problem, is that such a scheme would make it more likely that applications would end up parsing raw string representations themselves (with ensuing subtle differences even for things which are nominally meant to be identical, say dates or numbers and possibly security problems as well).
YAML has traditionally been used as the basis of higher-level configuration files for particular applications. What I'm saying is that implicit typing should be permitted, but delegated to those applications.
Conversely, I'm not saying that StrictYAML should do anything by default with unquoted values, except reporting them to the application as being an unquoted value. This way the application could choose to process the value differently from those that are quoted.