Parameter-file interface

[hcferguson]

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[hcferguson]

Trello card: https://trello.com/c/Q0V6XhXL/50-parameter-file-interface

Github does not have a mechanism for file attachments to issues...so examples of trying various formats are attached to the Trello card.

For spectral fitting and other tools, we would like to have a disk-file storage format for specifying the models an parameters. Desirable features include:

• Human readable in ASCII format
  • Without too much cumbersome markup (e.g. not XML, or JSON)
• Output results from can be exported to the same format
• Comments and structure of the file is preserved when reading and writing (YAML does not support this)
• Allows a straightforward, hierarchical encoding of the object structure of the models and components
• Ideally adopt a format that is in widespread use and has a good python parser library, rather than invent one
• Ideally, adopt a format for which someone has already developed tools to build GUI menus.