Commit 3de596925d13f5f936cc82658e3e3002f8d9e048 - ndbl

Added paragraph on regularity/data properties to readme Getty Ritter 11 years ago

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33	33	[TOML](https://github.com/mojombo/toml), both of which are significantly
34	34	more complicated than NDBL.
35	35
36		For incredibly basic configurations—in particular, if you do not use
37		grouping at all—an NDBL file is also an executable BASH file which
38		defines a slew of environment variables.
	36	One major advantage of NDBL over other other configuration formats is that
	37	the NDBL grammar is a _regular language_, meaning it can be parsed in
	38	constant space by a finite state machine. While not intended for data
	39	storage, NDBL does possess the two qualities which are important for a
	40	data storage format: it is _self-describing_, meaning that you are
	41	guaranteed to be able to derive the internal representation of the
	42	external (serialized) document, and it is _round-tripping_, meaning that if
	43	we serialize an internal representation to a document and then convert
	44	back to an internal representation, we will obtain an identical internal
	45	representation. Note, for example, that neither XML or YAML necessarily
	46	have this property in practice.
	47
	48	As a pleasant but unintended side effect, an executable bash file that
	49	does nothing but define environment variables is trivially an NDBL
	50	file.
39	51
40	52	Structure of an NDBL Document
41	53	-----------------------------