It's nice that things have gone in the direction of XML and JSON lately, and many people devise formats that build upon those. I was thinking more of arbitrary

It's nice that things have gone in the direction of XML and JSON lately, and many people devise formats that build upon those. I was thinking more of arbitrary text formats. Even if it's XML or JSON though, the existing parsers only handle comprehending the structure of the data itself. You have to write some semantic analysis on top of those, because the standard "parser" will just give you the input data as a tree - but the semi-standard format certainly helps a lot. I do think you overestimate the work required to write a parser for simpler formats - for someone familiar with one of the popular parser generators this can be a handful of hours, and the quality of results should be much higher than an ad hoc method. This can be a good design decision.