Re: A standard package for config files is needed

[dennison@telepath.com (Ted Dennison)]

"Marin David Condic" <dont.bother.mcondic.auntie.spam@[acm.org> wrote in message news:<ad0q6q$30r$1@nh.pace.co.uk>...
> narrowed down to the needs of an INI file. With a Map, you've got everything
> you need to store & query attribute/value pairs, eh? (Editing by hand might

If you were to use a Grace-style map, I think you'd have to view every
value as a string (most likely, an Ada.Strings.Unbounded_String). His
example showed numbers, which presumably folks would want to
manipulate as numbers, not strings. Then again, Ada's 'value makes it
pretty easy to do the transformation. However, the user would have to
handle any errors due to the value being the wrong type.

Its tough to tell from nothing more than an uncommented example, but
it looked like there was a wee bit more structure to it than just a
bunch of attribute/value pairs. If that's the case, Maps could
probably not be used, and a special structure might be required. It
would be nice to know how much structure there really should be, and
what it could be.

The way the NT registry works, Keys are stored in a hierarchy (think
of them as directories), and each one may have multiple "values". A
value has 3 attributes, its name, its *type*, and its actual value.
There are lots of different possible types, but in general they are
all a pain to deal with. :-)  Most folks just stick to the string or
string array types.

> Assuming we get a Grace component to do this, it might even make a nice
> extension to the Grace library - a descendent of Maps that handles

If we are talking of it as a standard Ada thing, then I agree.