Use whatever and stick to it. The sane structured data formats differ little but by shape of the braces and some punctuation. Were UNIX developers thinking about this back in the days, they'd probably chose s-expressions or something else from that era. Now it may as well be JSON. The thing is, one format should have been picked, and a parser for it should have been available in a system library. Then we wouldn't have to agree on anything, we'd have one system standard to use.
