I've written a short post on including support for configuration down at the language level, including a small preliminary half-functional example of what this might look like in Python, available at http://jasonfager.com/?p=440.
The basic idea is that a language could offer syntactic support for declaring configurable points in the program. The language system would then offer an api to allow the end user to discover a programs configuration service, as well as a general api for providing configuration values. The included example implements the first bit and hints at the third, defining a function that looks up what variable its output will be assigned to and tries to find a corresponding value from a configuration source. It's very preliminary, but I hope it gives a flavor of the general idea. Any thoughts or feedback would be greatly appreciated. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
