P18 was written when I was involved in the development of a (commercial) application using a PHP based web-frontend, which needed to support multiple languages. I looked at phpLang, but that was not the kind of solution I was looking for. I wanted an internationalization system that allowed the web programmer to ignore internationalization issues for most of his task and didn't require the translator to know anything about the implementation of the web application. P18 offers just that, along with a powerful macro processor.

I am not currently working on P18, but I am willing to maintain the package and fix bugs as necessary.

• A configuration file format.
• A building block for defining file formats and/or communication protocols.
• An object serialization format.
• ...

Every simple object has three possible representations:

• A text representation. Can be read and modified easily using a text editor.
• A binary representation.
• A representation as a life object.

If your application needs to encode, decode, transmit, and/or store structured data and you feel that XML is too verbose and ASN.1 is too bloated, then simple objects might be what you are looking for.