On May 11, 2006, at 10:48 PM, Pavel Cahyna wrote:

> What about the old NeXTSTEP (is it NeXTSTEP?) text format? If human
> readability and editability is a concern, I think it is much more
> human-readable and editable. (Imagine using property lists for the  
> kernel
> command line - entering a property list in the boot loader would be  
> much
> easier in the NeXTSTEP format than in the XML format.)

The old-style plist format used by OpenStep cannot represent  
numbers.  From the reference you cite:

ASCII property lists support the four primary property list data  
types: NSString (java.lang.String in Java), NSData, NSArray, and  
NSDictionary. Additionally, NSDate and NSNumber objects can be  
archived, but will become strings when unarchived.

-- thorpej