Can you give an example? Things like the ISC dhcpd.conf are declarative, and the advantage that it "looks" like a programming language is that it's easy to rea

Can you give an example? Things like the ISC dhcpd.conf are declarative, and the advantage that it "looks" like a programming language is that it's easy to read and see/form dependencies for complex setups--it's not just a big list of key/value pairs. That makes sense for a tool with a lot of capabilities. A quick glance at /etc doesn't reveal anything other than structured declarative files, key/value pairs, or delimited. There's a been a trend to use XML recently, which I find to be overly verbose for a configuration file, but even the XML-esque format that Apache uses is pretty much just a big list of key/value pairs.