Re: A little database

[dennison@telepath.com (Ted Dennison)]

porton@ex-code.com (Victor Porton) wrote in message news:<3dd49c15$0$303$bed64819@news.gradwell.net>...
> I want to keep a little database (containing information about several 
> Web sites) on the disk.
> 
> It is desirable (but not necessary) to have the file format 
> portable among platforms and compilers (however I use only GNAT).
> 
> In your opinion, All, should I use XML or just 'Read/'Write etc. 
> attributes? Or may be there are a special Ada library for such small 
> databases in disk files?
> 
> Well, the database shall be editable by the user with my GUI.

For a database, the most sensible portable format would be CSV. That
way it can be imported, exported, edited, and manipulated with any
database or spreadsheet tool you users might have or want (even a text
editor). Unless you have complicated hierarchal relationships that
can't be easily expressed in tabular format, XML is overkill (and
relatively poorly supported overkill, at that).

I don't know of any Ada support for creating CSV's, but the format is
trivial to generate with standard Text_IO calls, and OpenToken
(http://www.telepath.com/~dennison/Ted/OpenToken/OpenToken.html ) has
support for parsing it.