Thoughts on language-level configuration support?

[jfager]

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.