Re: config files proposal

[Volkert Barr <barr@cs.tu-berlin.de>]

Darren New wrote:
> 
> Ted Dennison wrote:
> > Yeah, but then you can't make group comments, like:
> >   -----------------------------------------------------------
> >   -- The next few items set up system timeout values. Valid
> >   -- values range from 0 to 120. The units are in seconds.
> >   -- A timeout value of 0 indicates no timeout.
> 
> Sure. Any comment more than 76 characters wide gets wrapped on output.
> 
> > > -- This is comment one
> > > key1=value1
> > > -- This is comment two
> > > key2=value2
> >
> > True, but it complicates the parsing code significantly, while XML
> > could handle it easily with some kind of attribute-comment tag.
> 
> Uh, it does? I don't *think* so. It seems quite straightforward to parse
> such a thing.
The problem here is not the parsing of an comment. The problem is to
what
kind of element the comment belongs. This information is needed, if i
want
my application to read, manipulate and write an configuration 
data from/back to a file without losing my comment information. Please,
i have 
set up a  small data model, which take this case into count (comment is
traditionally 
called description). Look at
http://swt.cs.tu-berlin.de/~barr/config_package.pdf.
If such a case should be handled, is is up to us to define a appropriate 
grammar.

Volkert