My distaste for yaml led me to attempt just that. The first piece that was missing for me was a python parser that could produce reasonable error messages and could be transformed into the desired internal representation in python. So I wrote one [0]. It was supposed to be a single file that was less than 100 lines and could be copied and pasted into any project that I needed. Turns out that the issue was a bit more complex.
The issue is that there is sufficient complexity in finding a portable representation for configuration formats that it just kicks the can down the road. On the other hand it means that as soon as you decide what format you are going to support you can quickly implement it. There is more or less a intersectional grammar that works across most if not all lisps, and that is the plist `(:k v :k2 (:k3 v2))`. So I settled on that for my own use.
After all that work I have not dealt with the fact that numbers and chars do not have a portable representation across lisp dialects, which is a key complaint in other threads here. Limited support for let binding constants also seems like a feature that would
allow for just enough expressivity to make the format useful without opening up the terror that is `&` and `*` in yaml (cool and useful as it may be).
In summary s-expressions are:
1. missing good parsers in a number of language ecosystems
2. not standard across lisp dialects
3. need additional semantics for binding, multiple expressions, etc.
4. still better than yaml and json
The issue is that there is sufficient complexity in finding a portable representation for configuration formats that it just kicks the can down the road. On the other hand it means that as soon as you decide what format you are going to support you can quickly implement it. There is more or less a intersectional grammar that works across most if not all lisps, and that is the plist `(:k v :k2 (:k3 v2))`. So I settled on that for my own use.
After all that work I have not dealt with the fact that numbers and chars do not have a portable representation across lisp dialects, which is a key complaint in other threads here. Limited support for let binding constants also seems like a feature that would allow for just enough expressivity to make the format useful without opening up the terror that is `&` and `*` in yaml (cool and useful as it may be).
In summary s-expressions are: 1. missing good parsers in a number of language ecosystems 2. not standard across lisp dialects 3. need additional semantics for binding, multiple expressions, etc. 4. still better than yaml and json
0. https://github.com/tgbugs/sxpyr