Re: Config_Files proposal

[Stephen Leake <stephen.a.leake.1@gsfc.nasa.gov>]

Darren New <dnew@san.rr.com> writes:

R> Ted Dennison wrote:
> > Darren New wrote:
> >
> >> I think "forbid simultaneous access" is fine. But that's not what
> >> you're doing. You're doing "screw the user if there's simultaneous
> >> access." Kind of the way C "forbids" indexing off the end of an
> >> array. ;-)
> > I'm probably missing something here. How is this worse than the
> > current situation with Ada.Text_IO?
> 
> If I have a text editor program and a compiler,  I can save the source
> from my editor window (using Text_IO to write it) and then compile it
> with the compiler (using Text_IO to read it). This works like the user
> expects.
> 
> What the user doesn't expect is to run two copies of the text editor,
> change the configuration in one, and have that configuration disappear
> simply because they closed the other window later.

That's what happens when you run two copies of the text editor, change
the same source file in both, and save from both. One set of changes
is lost.

Why should config files be different?

Hmm, one answer is "because the config file is hidden". That makes
sense; we can expect the user to be aware of loading the same source
file into to copies of the text editor, but not immediately aware of
sharing one config file between the two copies of the text editor.

But I still think the right answer in this case is one of:

"use a better (multi-document) text editor".

"use the registry for resources shared by multiple processes".

"use separate config files for separate instances of applications"

-- 
-- Stephe