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At some point I read that one motivation behind the Guile project is the standardization of application init files. That is, the proliferation of strange init file syntax could be stopped if a means were available to read structured data stored using a parenthesized S-expression notation, which incidentally could be easily read by Scheme. A simple C library could also be written to read S-expressions, when embedding a full Scheme interpreter in an application is not a good idea. Has anyone worked on a specification for either of these ideas? I am faced with a work project right now where one application reads several init files, and each uses its own bizarre syntax. The situation is really bothering me, since at my last job, my programs stored data on disk as the print representation of Scheme association lists. The C library I used before allowed me to read an S-expressions from a file and interpret the data as a list or dictionary. It was implemented in C on top of Guile and in Java on top of Kawa, so it was a bit of an overkill for reading init files. Nevertheless, it did standardize and simplify the job of reading application initialization files. bob