Every Sufficiently Advanced Configuration Language Is Wrong

Re:Every Sufficiently Advanced Configuration Language Is Wrong by hedora on Saturday June 25, 2022 @03:32AM (#31873316)

I miss systems use lex, bison, or their successors to define an appropriate configuration file format.

There ought to be some way to export the data structure definitions those things parse to, and then generate go/python/whatever bindings with IDE support for people that want to programmatically manipulate the config files.

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Re:Every Sufficiently Advanced Configuration Language Is Wrong by plasticchris on Saturday June 25, 2022 @07:29AM (#31874353)

Isn’t this what protocol buffers do?

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Re:Every Sufficiently Advanced Configuration Language Is Wrong by hedora on Saturday June 25, 2022 @11:21AM (#31875970)

Protocol buffers use code generation, but the format is not human readable. Also, the format is less expressive than a full grammar, and, in many cases completely unchecked. (It will often "successfully" deserialize data written for the wrong protobuf struct type, which produces random hex gibberish.)

Something like ~/.ssh/config is closer to what I am talking about.

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Re:Every Sufficiently Advanced Configuration Language Is Wrong by fragmede on Saturday June 25, 2022 @01:38PM (#31877125)

~/.ssh/config has some some wildcard support, but I've been in situations where that wasn't enough, and I had to generate them using python with templates and variables. It got ugly pretty fast.

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