If you must have structured data, use a lisp program. Congratulations on using a format that was designed to be executable. and if it's a build tool, you better believe it's executable. I suspect that Annatar is a Murray Hill purist (I don't know for sure), so he may disagree with me.
Of course, like any real programming language, it's hard to process with regex, but then again, I don't want to process makefiles with regex. And you might have some luck coaxing AWK or the SNOBOL family to parse it, and it would be far easier than doing the same with XML.
>please don't use XML for applications which must run on UNIX. It's a nightmare. It's horrible. No!!!
I'd disagree with you there. DocBook, HTML, and friends, are all good applications of XML (or near XML), doing what XML was designed for: Document Markup.
Seriously people, when you're writing a program in a language that has "Markup Language" in the name, does that not ring any alarm bells?
Of course, like any real programming language, it's hard to process with regex, but then again, I don't want to process makefiles with regex. And you might have some luck coaxing AWK or the SNOBOL family to parse it, and it would be far easier than doing the same with XML.
>please don't use XML for applications which must run on UNIX. It's a nightmare. It's horrible. No!!!
I'd disagree with you there. DocBook, HTML, and friends, are all good applications of XML (or near XML), doing what XML was designed for: Document Markup.
Seriously people, when you're writing a program in a language that has "Markup Language" in the name, does that not ring any alarm bells?