Why not XML

Lots of reasons.

• He'd have to encode it and decode it.
• He's probably not sending information between machines or processes yet. He may never do that.
• You can add data to hashes too.
• It's more complex to retrieve data from XML.
• You'll have to add XML processing modules to the script. That's fine if you need it, but why?

Perl has built-in data structures that do the job perfectly well; using XML would mean that a module has to translate XML to and from those very same data structures. Why not skip a step?

Update: Re-reading the question, I can understand reading it as asking for a storage mechanism. XML's not bad in that case. I prefer YAML, but XML's workable.

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