No, a programming language like C have both a syntax and an execution model. In Turing-machine terminology, it has a set of symbols and rules for processing the

No, a programming language like C have both a syntax and an execution model. In Turing-machine terminology, it has a set of symbols and rules for processing the symbols. This is why you can reason about things like the halting-problem. If you only have a set of symbols but no rules for processing the symbols, you don't have a machine, and you cant meaningfully talk about "termination". INI does not have a defined execution model, so it is not a machine the way C is. A particular implementation could read the data into key-value maps but it is not required to. E.g. it could just search through the file for a specific key. Or it could do nothing.