On Jan 05, 2005, at 21:31, Dick Davies wrote:

> so now I tend to write the data as ruby
> in the first place.

You might like Lua then:

http://www.lua.org/

It's started life as a data description format and is now a full 
fledged scripting language:

http://www.lua.org/history.html

Cheers,

PA.