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Mitchell Hashimoto 2014-08-03 13:40:22 -07:00
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@ -13,6 +13,37 @@ HCL is heavily inspired by
[libucl](https://github.com/vstakhov/libucl),
nginx configuration, and others similar.
## Why?
A common question when viewing HCL is to ask the question: why not
JSON, YAML, etc.?
Prior to HCL, the tools we built at [HashiCorp](http://www.hashicorp.com)
used a variety of configuration languages from full programming languages
such as Ruby to complete data structure languages such as JSON. What we
learned is that some people wanted human-friendly configuration languages
and some people wanted machine-friendly languages.
JSON fits a nice balance in this, but is fairly verbose and most
importantly doesn't support comments. With YAML, we found that beginners
had a really hard time determining what the actual structure was, and
ended up guessing more than not whether to use a hyphen, colon, etc.
in order to represent some configuration key.
Full programming languages such as Ruby enable complex behavior
a configuration language shouldn't usually allow, and also forces
people to learn some set of Ruby.
Because of this, we decided to create our own configuration language
that is JSON-compatible. Our configuration language (HCL) is designed
to be written and modified by humans. The API for HCL allows JSON
as an input so that it is also machine-friendly (machines can generate
JSON instead of trying to generate HCL).
Our goal with HCL is not to alienate other configuration languages.
It is instead to provide HCL as a specialized language for our tools,
and JSON as the interoperability layer.
## Syntax
The complete grammar