Re: A standard package for config files is needed

[Georg Bauhaus <sb463ba@l1-hrz.uni-duisburg.de>]

tmoran@acm.org wrote:
:   so it
: doesn't matter if it's ASCII or whatever.  If you are going to allow safe
: concurrent access, the config file obviously can't be a simple ASCII file.

Not only that. It seems quite plausible, with Ada being capable of
handling a substantial subset of Unicode, and for more than one
other reason, to store something more than
(US) American Standard Code for Information Interchange
wich isn't even enough for directly storing all US american words,
let alone anything that might be needed in Canada, Brazil,
Russia, France, Korea, Egypt, Japan, ...
(E.g. error messages.)

If your editors aren't capable of handling anything but 7bit
or latin1 or some such, and you use that as an argument to
_always_ stay with ASCII, then the ASCII anachronism is likely to last.
I wouldn't like to edit Strings like "r[00F4]le" with a lookup-table
open in another window (or a print of such a table on my desk)
essentially for eye-movement trainging.  For compatibility,  like with
6 bit computers, where "ASCII-Editors" vi or notepad or whatever won't help,
there is still enough power in Ada to build a suitable abstraction,
so you could write a program for config file inspection for any
mechanism, including a 6 bit characters text file.