COIL and COILettes

Douglas Crockford started a minor war when he observed that JavaScript's object initialisation syntax provides a neat way to persist hierarchical data, maybe more suitable to some situations than XML.

Since C# 3.0 we've had a similar facility in C#. This means an opportunity for another war.

I've started to see little object initialisation trees appearing in my code, and they start to look like a declarative internal DSL. I should post a real example some time. Anyway, this can only mean one thing: we need a snappy name for these things.

JSON stands for JavaScript Object Notation, and it sounds sort of like the name Jason, which makes it catchy. So we need a four letter acronym that starts with CS (for C-Sharp) where you pronounce the first letter as a syllable and it all sounds like a person's name. This immediately lead me to:

CSIL (pronounced "Cecil" in the American way):

C-Sharp Initialisation Language.

Sadly somebody already used that for something else.

Ah well, it was just too perfect.

But not to be discouraged, I relaxed the rules so it just has to be a four letter acronym that sounds like a word, and went for:

COIL (pronounced "coil", amazingly):

C# Object Initialisation Language.

The beauty of this becomes apparent when you consider that we also need a way to describe those little islands of COIL that appear embedded in our C# programs.

They are called COILettes.