Variants Reference

A variant is a named profile that bundles behavior choices and expected feature support into a single spec-compliance posture. Implementations declare a variant to say “I aim to match this reading of the spec.”

Variants exist so the test suite can filter on a single field rather than enumerating every (behavior, feature) tuple that defines a conformance level.

Each heading below is the canonical anchor for the corresponding variant:* tag in the test suite.

reference_compliant

Tag: variant:reference_compliant

Matches the OCaml reference implementation’s semantics. An implementation declaring reference_compliant commits to:

• toplevel_indent_strip for continuation baseline — parse uses N = 0 at top level, top-level keys are String.trim-ed.
• continuation_tab_to_space for continuation tab handling — leading \t on continuation lines normalizes 1:1 to a single space.
• indent_spaces for indentation output — formatting functions emit two spaces per level.
• Support for the tab_in_value_preserved and toplevel_indent_strip features.
• The bare-list hierarchy shape (array of objects) for build_hierarchy output.
• The CRLF uniform-handling rule when combined with crlf_preserve_literal.

New implementations should target this variant unless they have a specific reason to diverge.

See Also

• Functions Reference
• Features Reference
• Behavior Reference