I've always been a fan of the .INI syntax but the lack of a standard (which I think Microsoft should have championed) made the format hard to use consistently.

I've always been a fan of the .INI syntax but the lack of a standard (which I think Microsoft should have championed) made the format hard to use consistently. There have been attempts at standardization [1] but, alas, they never spread widely enough. In light of the above, I'm glad to see an INI-derived format with a real spec -- not necessarily because it might replace JSON but because it might replace INI. Speaking of INI, for the longest time the killer app for INI files for me was persistent data storage in batch scripts (.bat/.cmd files in Windows 9x/NT). Using a command line utility like [2] or a similar program from IBM that sadly wasn't legally redistributable you were able to achieve persistence with minimum effort, which would otherwise be difficult to program in batch. I even wrote a portable clone of inifile.exe for MS-DOS and Linux to be able reuse my scripts more easily. TOML would sure benefit from the same. [1] http://www.cloanto.com/specs/ini/ http://www.cloanto.com/specs/ini/ [2] http://www.horstmuc.de/wbat32.htm#inifile http://www.horstmuc.de/wbat32.htm#inifile