The @ idea is interesting, but I think we are looking at it from the wrong angle. There are potentially several different features involved here.

First, if we are loading one axis (or one group) from a file, the user should know what s/he is loading and could use a specific function to load that. eg read_axis(), read_group(), or similar.

It is probably valuable to have a format to save/load those one at a time from a custom format, and in that case the @ solution you describe seems a good compromise between readabilty, simplicity and functionality.

FWIW, I prefer to see "realistic" examples to gauge syntaxes. Your above proposals would be:

@sex,M,F
@country,BE,FR,DE,NL,LU
Benelux@country,BE,NL,LU

@axis,sex,M,F
@axis,country,BE,FR,DE,NL,LU
@group,Benelux,country,BE,NL,LU

But, what I think users need more is

to save and load back an entire session containing arrays and groups in whatever format we like. In this case, I don't think a format for a single Axis or Group would help. We need to define a format to encode multiple axes/groups in a single file. HDF5 seems the easiest to implement, but we could also define a custom format for Excel, something a special sheet containing all axes and a special sheet containing all groups would probably be the most convenient for users. I thought this issue was about this part.
to make it easy to create axes and groups from arbitrary external sources. Most likely candidates are .csv files and ranges in Excel sheets (see ensure it is easy to create groups from an Excel or .csv file #155).

Allow to save and load all Axis and Group objects of a session in/from HDF, CSV and EXCEL files #578

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