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+# HCL
+
+[![GoDoc](https://godoc.org/github.com/hashicorp/hcl?status.png)](https://godoc.org/github.com/hashicorp/hcl) [![Build Status](https://travis-ci.org/hashicorp/hcl.svg?branch=master)](https://travis-ci.org/hashicorp/hcl)
+
+HCL (HashiCorp Configuration Language) is a configuration language built
+by HashiCorp. The goal of HCL is to build a structured configuration language
+that is both human and machine friendly for use with command-line tools, but
+specifically targeted towards DevOps tools, servers, etc.
+
+HCL is also fully JSON compatible. That is, JSON can be used as completely
+valid input to a system expecting HCL. This helps makes systems
+interoperable with other systems.
+
+HCL is heavily inspired by
+[libucl](https://github.com/vstakhov/libucl),
+nginx configuration, and others similar.
+
+## Why?
+
+A common question when viewing HCL is to ask the question: why not
+JSON, YAML, etc.?
+
+Prior to HCL, the tools we built at [HashiCorp](http://www.hashicorp.com)
+used a variety of configuration languages from full programming languages
+such as Ruby to complete data structure languages such as JSON. What we
+learned is that some people wanted human-friendly configuration languages
+and some people wanted machine-friendly languages.
+
+JSON fits a nice balance in this, but is fairly verbose and most
+importantly doesn't support comments. With YAML, we found that beginners
+had a really hard time determining what the actual structure was, and
+ended up guessing more often than not whether to use a hyphen, colon, etc.
+in order to represent some configuration key.
+
+Full programming languages such as Ruby enable complex behavior
+a configuration language shouldn't usually allow, and also forces
+people to learn some set of Ruby.
+
+Because of this, we decided to create our own configuration language
+that is JSON-compatible. Our configuration language (HCL) is designed
+to be written and modified by humans. The API for HCL allows JSON
+as an input so that it is also machine-friendly (machines can generate
+JSON instead of trying to generate HCL).
+
+Our goal with HCL is not to alienate other configuration languages.
+It is instead to provide HCL as a specialized language for our tools,
+and JSON as the interoperability layer.
+
+## Syntax
+
+For a complete grammar, please see the parser itself. A high-level overview
+of the syntax and grammar is listed here.
+
+ * Single line comments start with `#` or `//`
+
+ * Multi-line comments are wrapped in `/*` and `*/`. Nested block comments
+ are not allowed. A multi-line comment (also known as a block comment)
+ terminates at the first `*/` found.
+
+ * Values are assigned with the syntax `key = value` (whitespace doesn't
+ matter). The value can be any primitive: a string, number, boolean,
+ object, or list.
+
+ * Strings are double-quoted and can contain any UTF-8 characters.
+ Example: `"Hello, World"`
+
+ * Multi-line strings start with `<<EOF` at the end of a line, and end
+ with `EOF` on its own line ([here documents](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Here_document)).
+ Any text may be used in place of `EOF`. Example:
+```
+<<FOO
+hello
+world
+FOO
+```
+
+ * Numbers are assumed to be base 10. If you prefix a number with 0x,
+ it is treated as a hexadecimal. If it is prefixed with 0, it is
+ treated as an octal. Numbers can be in scientific notation: "1e10".
+
+ * Boolean values: `true`, `false`
+
+ * Arrays can be made by wrapping it in `[]`. Example:
+ `["foo", "bar", 42]`. Arrays can contain primitives
+ and other arrays, but cannot contain objects. Objects must
+ use the block syntax shown below.
+
+Objects and nested objects are created using the structure shown below:
+
+```
+variable "ami" {
+ description = "the AMI to use"
+}
+```
+
+## Thanks
+
+Thanks to:
+
+ * [@vstakhov](https://github.com/vstakhov) - The original libucl parser
+ and syntax that HCL was based off of.
+
+ * [@fatih](https://github.com/fatih) - The rewritten HCL parser
+ in pure Go (no goyacc) and support for a printer.