[marcosdumay]

Well, that's why you use a library.

What's important is that it's easy to read and write. And that's yet another reason to standardize you language, so that you don't need to trade legibility over parseability, because you'll only need to write the parser once.

The only problem I see with that is that some programs use turing-complete configuration languages, while for most of them that'd be a bug, not a feature. One just can not standardize all *nix tools in one configuration language... maybe two, but not one.