I sometimes call it the "Lisp non-syntax", because it's so trivial to define something-Lispish and parse it, even in a language with crappy string support like straight C with nothing but the standard library, that it's hardly like you're writing a parser at all.
Slamming out a halfway decent parser is getting easier than it used to be with things like Parsec, and JSON support is nice enough in the languages I work in that I tend to just use that now, but in the 90s I went to this solution several times. (XML, on the other hand, wasn't much help. It did indeed take care of the real grunt work of processing but what was left over still took a lot of love to translate into the native idioms of the program you were in, what with the attributes and the mixed content and whatnot.)
Slamming out a halfway decent parser is getting easier than it used to be with things like Parsec, and JSON support is nice enough in the languages I work in that I tend to just use that now, but in the 90s I went to this solution several times. (XML, on the other hand, wasn't much help. It did indeed take care of the real grunt work of processing but what was left over still took a lot of love to translate into the native idioms of the program you were in, what with the attributes and the mixed content and whatnot.)