> Who in their right mind would ever want to embed a full blown scripting language if your usecase is... Open a file and input data?
Because embedding a mature, well written dependency that fully satisfies all your requirements might well be easier from a technical standpoint. It's certainly likely to reduce your comparative future maintenance burden given that the upstream community is healthy and functional.
> Because embedding a mature, well written dependency
What? Are there no mature well written parsers?
Don't be ridiculous.
I thought the comparison was between embedding a Scheme or implementing your own sexp parser from scratch. Of course embedding a good sexp parser is also a valid option to consider, I'm not that dense.
Granted that in this particular case the point seems to have been the exercise of implementing the parser itself so embedding a dependency wasn't a valid approach to begin with.
This sort of nonsense is a good example of how some projects die due to absurd feature creep that no one at all can possibly justify. Who in their right mind would ever want to embed a full blown scripting language if your usecase is... Open a file and input data?
If you want to input data following a document format, you parse the document format. That's it.