> Naive question: is it viable if we started using [a Turing-complete programming language] This is actually a good question. The people who are not asking and

> Naive question: is it viable if we started using [a Turing-complete programming language] This is actually a good question. The people who are not asking and going right ahead with that plan are doing a dangerous thing. <https://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~sergey/langsec/occupy/ https://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~sergey/langsec/occupy/> It's not viable because a subset of people would like to have the following properties upheld: • Parsing configuration should be decidable and finish in finite time. • Parsing configuration should not be a security exploit. • I should not have to implement the Emacs runtime just to parse its configuration file. > something that's both more flexible but still strict and unambiguous. I wonder if it's possible? This really depends on what you mean by these words; I'm interested to hear your idea in detail. Meanwhile, have a look at Dhall <https://dhall-lang.org/ https://dhall-lang.org/> and the other languages mentioned in <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29221643 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29221643> and compare.