My point of view is: - make it easy to write and to read at the expense of having complexity in the parser / implementation. Programs (or documents) are writte

My point of view is: - make it easy to write and to read at the expense of having complexity in the parser / implementation. Programs (or documents) are written and read a lot of times, it's worth optimizing, as long as it does not make the implementation unmaintainable. I'm saying that as a writer of several manually crafted parsers. - avoid ambiguities in the grammar at all cost. They just suck for every party involved. As for indentation vs braces to delimit blocks, I practice both and don't really have any preference.