Gerv

As you can see, we did look at other popular formats, with significant drawbacks.

“Among the hardest things to get right in designing any text file format are issues of quoting, whitespace and other low-level syntax details. Custom file formats often suffer from slightly broken syntax that doesn’t quite match other similar formats. Using a standard format …, which is verifiable and parsed by a standard library, eliminates most of these issues.

– Keith Packard”

However, if you are absolutely determined to roll your own, “The Art of Unix Programming” has some really good chapters on designing file formats, which are required reading.
http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/ch05s02.html

Gerv

Regarding your second comment, we kinda decoupled the question of performance and format by being introducing the compilation of lol into js, which solves more bottlenecks than just parsing, AFAICT right now.

In general, as noted on an earlier post, I think the LOL format is surely open to modification and not set in stone yet, and your changes surely look friendlier, and I’m not sure it’s really worse for a parser. I think we need something different than a dumb regexp parser in any case if we want to be performant.

appName{
string: “Jägermeister”;
gender: “male”;
}

complex(appName.gender){
male: “Ein hübscher ${appName}s.”;
female: “Ein hübsches ${appName}s.”;
}

This way the code reads a little more naturally and regularly than having an = here and a : there.