Dear Paul
I don't think that changing notation will result in solving my problem. Having a pretty printer for generic data structures in Perl should do the trick, and, as far as I am concerned, things could become nasty when I try to explain operations fellows that they will see data in a format that is not perl anymore, but isn't also "pure data", but another programming language. That's possibly too much information for them.

BTW, thanks for you interest. The tip about YAML::Syck looks interesting and I will try to study a bit more the issue before saying something.

Thank you!