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copied!<p>First: This is a really big debate issue, not a quick Q+A.</p> <p>My favourite right now is to simply include <a href="http://www.lua.org" rel="noreferrer">Lua</a>, because</p> <ul> <li>I can permit things like width=height*(1+1/3)</li> <li>I can make custom functions available</li> <li>I can forbid anything else. (impossible in, for instance, Python (including pickles.))</li> <li>I'll probably want a scripting language somewhere else in the project anyway.</li> </ul> <p>Another option, if there's a lot of data is to use <a href="http://www.sqlite.org/" rel="noreferrer">sqlite3</a>, because they're right to claim</p> <ul> <li>Small.</li> <li>Fast.</li> <li>Reliable.</li> </ul> <p><em>Choose any three.</em></p> <p>To which I would like to add:</p> <ul> <li>backups are a snap. (just copy the db file.)</li> <li>easier to switch to another db, ODBC, whatever. (than it is from fugly-file)</li> </ul> <p>But again, this is a bigger issue. A "big" answer to this probably involves some kind of feature matrix or list of situations like:</p> <h2>Amount of data, or short runtime</h2> <ul> <li>For large amounts of data, you might want efficient storage, like a db.</li> <li>For short runs (often), you might want something that you don't need to do a lot of parsing for, consider something that can be mmap:ed in directly.</li> </ul> <h2>What does the configuration relate to?</h2> <ul> <li>Host: <ul> <li>I like YAML in /etc. Is that reimplemented in windows?</li> </ul></li> <li>User: <ul> <li>Do you permit users to edit config with text editor?</li> <li>Should it be centrally manageable? Registry / gconf / remote db?</li> <li>May the user have several different <em>profiles</em>?</li> </ul></li> <li>Project: <ul> <li>File(s) in project directory? (Version control usually follows this model...)</li> </ul></li> </ul> <h2>Complexity</h2> <ul> <li>Are there only a few flat values? Consider YAML.</li> <li>Is the data nested, or dependent in some way? (This is where it gets interesting.)</li> <li>Might it be a desirable feature to permit some form of scripting?</li> <li>Templates can be viewed as a kind of configuration files..</li> </ul>

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