that’s a different issue, an in fact I think it’s justifies having a selector language.
I already implemented the dot notation to access elements (check the Swush.select() or the bottom of the “What is swush” page.
I think we should look at xpath for inspiration for more ideas for the selector language, but first we need to stabilize swush itself.

btw: get online on jabber, I can’t see you.

grp {
key : value
}

is equivalent to

grp.key : value

from the API i would like to be able to access the values like: cfg["grp"]["key"] or better cfg["grp.key"], or, say in python, as cfg.grp.key which somehow makes me want to enforce the dot notation

or, in the next version:
array [1 2 3]

with your suggestion, the first one will be parsed as:
KEY: key
VALUE: value key:value

currently line breaks are treated as separators and are ignored.
I think that’s the formating flexibility offered by this approach outweigh the benefits of never having to quote a string.

about multiline strings, as I said – your suggestion is good and I`ll see if it can cleanly merged into the swush (but as an addition, not instead of anything else).

even braces inside a single line value shouldn’t be a problem: if brace (or even colon) is after a colon it’s part of the value, making the following parseable:

url : http://swush.firefang.net/
title : swush ain’t afraid of no {}

only when brace immediately (bar white space) follows a key does it start a new group. this rule can be extended to allow a different formatting:

grp
{
key : value
}

the key to lexer / parser programming will be using states – are we parsing a key, delimiter or value now (or something).

you’ll obviously need string-delimiters for multi-line strings (well, not obviously, you could also escape new lines, but that’s again ugly), but I’m not sure you need quotes for single line strings. May be to escape comment delimiters.

key : “a value”

key : DELIM
string
string
“quoted string”
DELIM

where DELIM is something rare, like “”" (triple quote) or ~~ ? (in the above example the long string doesn’t start / end with empty lines, it only contains lines between the two lines containing DELIM, each content line is \n terminated for consistency)

“this is a very long
sentence : it have a few
new lines, some {curly} braces and even some \”quotes\”!”

note that you need to escape the quotes inside the string by prefixing with a backslash.
in the current version, the returned string will contain the \” instead of “, but I`ll fix it soon.

2. since you can use quotes as I explained, I am not sure it’s a real problem.
if you disagree please explain.

Remark 2.
I find it simple, direct and powerful to be able to write “bare” strings like format : %t%s
BUT the problem is with languages like C# or even Python where the new formats are like {0:3d}={1:6d}
Notice the colon in the format.