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Universal configuration language

github.com

1–10 of 29 posts

Re: Universal configuration language

#3
Looks interesting, however the only reason JSON is generally used IMHO is because it's light and compatible. There is no reason to make the new language look like JS (a lame legacy language). It could look like YAML but still support JSON for legacy stuff.

Re: Universal configuration language

#5
post #2

Doesn't Lisp already exist?

A "configuration language" by definition (in my opinion) should not be Turing complete. A configuration language is for storing state - key/value pairs or simple structures of primitive types, nothing more (or as little more as necessary), nothing less.

Once you introduce enough complexity (branching, recursion) you've just created another application with global variables for the main application to access - a capability that will probably almost never be desired (see XML), and the ability to unserialize into functions or otherwise executable code, which will also almost never be desired (XML, Yaml, probably a lot of things.)

Re: Universal configuration language

#7
post #5
post #2

Doesn't Lisp already exist?

A "configuration language" by definition (in my opinion) should not be Turing complete. A configuration language is for storing state - key/value pairs or simple structures of primitive types, nothing more (or as little more as necessary), nothing less. Once you introduce enough complexity (branching, recursion) you've just created another application with global variables for the main application to access - a capab…

If you are very careful, you can introduce some forms of recursion and branching without getting full Turing completeness.
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