Personally, I'm a big fan of YAML, it is expressive, easy to parse, read and write, but none of that is relevant for your question. Just use the format your co-workers are most familiar with, or even use all of these formats. It wouldn't be to difficult to write a routine that can translate each format into your internal data-representation and back again into another format.

The only formats I wouldn't use are those that are directly evaled as this will have important security concerns or those that put the data into modules, again for security reasons.

CountZero

A program should be light and agile, its subroutines connected like a string of pearls. The spirit and intent of the program should be retained throughout. There should be neither too little or too much, neither needless loops nor useless variables, neither lack of structure nor overwhelming rigidity." - The Tao of Programming, 4.1 - Geoffrey James

My blog: Imperial Deltronics

In reply to Re: Data-driven Programming: fun with Perl, JSON, YAML, XML... by CountZero
in thread Data-driven Programming: fun with Perl, JSON, YAML, XML... by eyepopslikeamosquito

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