Re: A standard package for config files is needed

["Marin David Condic" <dont.bother.mcondic.auntie.spam@[acm.org>]

I tend to agree that I don't see any big reason why a config file needs to
be in ASCII - so long as we're talking about an application preserving
various settings over its lifetime. (colors, fonts, user preferences of one
sort or another...) When you get to talking about things like "I need to
know what directory you installed XYZ in so I can find it and run..." then
you start seeing some need for ASCII - or at least some user-edit
capability.

Of course one could design apps to ask the user for this information on its
first execution or if it doesn't find what it wants & then store it from
there. It requires a little discipline in that case from the programming
side, but basically that means you don't have to store the data in any sort
of human readable format or worry about checking it for errors on input.
Building a data structure in memory and moving it in/out via Streams
provides an answer that is simple & portable to any platform. (You'd still
need to resolve how you would have different configurations for different
users, etc., but I could see that all as being resolved when designing the
"Ada Registry" package...)

MDC
--
Marin David Condic
Senior Software Engineer
Pace Micro Technology Americas    www.pacemicro.com
Enabling the digital revolution
e-Mail:    marin.condic@pacemicro.com


<tmoran@acm.org> wrote in message
news:tulJ8.9347$7q5.169326745@newssvr14.news.prodigy.com...
>   The Windows registry certainly is an all too common failure point and as
> a sort of parallel file system it's painful to backup/restore or uninstall
> programs, but improvements in config files are not, I suggest, to be found
> in better syntaxes for an ASCII text file.