Yes, but, my point was that I see it as very unlikely to be adopted.
"The documentation is quite perfect already"
Sure it's well-written but "perfect" may be a stretch. Having a more consistent syntax would allow the documentation to be much more terse.
The current documentation reads like a manual, which is great. What's being proposed would mean that the documentation could be presented as a manual, AND as an API.
"The only point I'm willing to hand you is the validation argument"
I think you should hand me "automation" as well. :-) Writing a tool that interprets a Lua config file would be trivial. Writing a tool that interprets the current Apache config is not.
Anyway I'm not really advocating this change. I simply find the proposal interesting because I do a lot of programming with Lua and it's nice to see it get some high-level recognition.
mod_perl already allows for a totally dynamic configuration which should be sufficient in terms of automation.
The documentation is quite perfect already and would IMHO lose quality if the syntax changes this drastically.
The only point I'm willing to hand you is the validation argument, although the current parser seems to be doing a decent enough job already.
No. Discussions like these feel to be motivated by artistic considerations instead of practical ones. Think of all the external documentation such a step would invalidate. Books, Tutorials, Blogs. And think of the external addon modules that would probably break because of this.
Remember the 1.3 => 2.0 switch and how long that took and consider that 2.0 actually had some real advantages compared to 1.3.