I'm not a fan of the usual uses of S-expressions in data formats, but for quite the opposite reasons. People seem to have a thing for making up new syntax, so y

I'm not a fan of the usual uses of S-expressions in data formats, but for quite the opposite reasons. People seem to have a thing for making up new syntax, so you can't just throw a normal S-expression parser at the problem, and be done with it. For example, the wasm2ps reader [1] has to know how to read a comment in the WebAssembly text format. I decided to leave the project at handling integer instructions and control flow only, as there are other oddities like using a single atom for alignment and offsets in load and store instructions [2]. Some people I've talked to wished that people would stop inventing ad-hoc syntaxes, and just use S-expressions or something. Using S-expressions but adding more ad-hoc syntax gives you the worst of both options. While admittedly less of a problem for implementation, it is also annoying to see lists with dangling parens on their own lines, and symbols with underscores or camelCase in the names, once you are used to the normal way of formatting Lisp code. [1] https://github.com/no-defun-allowed/wasm2ps/blob/master/Code/reader.lisp https://github.com/no-defun-allowed/wasm2ps/blob/master/Code... [2] https://github.com/WebAssembly/spec/blob/master/interpreter/README.md#s-expression-syntax https://github.com/WebAssembly/spec/blob/master/interpreter/...