This is exactly what the Starlark language was developed to solve, initially for Bazel but also used other places. It's a "full scripting language" but intentio

This is exactly what the Starlark language was developed to solve, initially for Bazel but also used other places. It's a "full scripting language" but intentionally doesn't (in default configuration) support recursion or unbounded loops, so is deterministic and bounded execution time. I really wish more projects would reach for it as a configuration language. https://github.com/bazelbuild/starlark https://github.com/bazelbuild/starlark