But then you have to evaluate things, which brings all kinds of problems.
Your parser is no longer 300 lines, and eventually you might snap and throw it all away for a full-blown interpreter which makes dealing with user provided input difficult.
I'm actually investigating using S-expressions for describing jobs and systems, but haven't figured out how to safely evaluate them short of running in isolated VMs.
Edit: thinking more about this, it is possible to represent all those things without evaluation. It's just awkward to create them... but that can be solved on a different level.
Your parser is no longer 300 lines, and eventually you might snap and throw it all away for a full-blown interpreter which makes dealing with user provided input difficult.
I'm actually investigating using S-expressions for describing jobs and systems, but haven't figured out how to safely evaluate them short of running in isolated VMs.
Edit: thinking more about this, it is possible to represent all those things without evaluation. It's just awkward to create them... but that can be solved on a different level.