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From: Stephen Leake <stephen.a.leake.1@gsfc.nasa.gov>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Config_Files proposal
Date: 24 Jun 2002 09:09:57 -0400
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Date: 2002-06-24T13:17:16+00:00
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"Marin David Condic" <dont.bother.mcondic.auntie.spam@[acm.org> writes:

> Well, if, for example, the decisions for the API lead to some kind of
> complex tree-like structure, you might have a really hard time storing this
> in some simpler file format like .CSV or as simple attribute/value pairs.

But that would violate the requirement that the API _must_ be
independent of the file format, and would therefore be a bad API
decision.

> I suggested elsewhere that establishing a package spec now and
> leaving the file format for later would be a wise thing. It starts
> some progress and helps clarify the problems. 

If I generalize this to "make some decisions now", choosing the file
format now is also wise :).

> Assumimg that the API is going to have something pretty basic like
> "Load/Store" operations with a file name and a data structure, you
> really don't have to settle the file format issues until later & it
> creates the possibility of trying out many different ones.

Since we need to settle on one file format, and we've had about a
month of discussion on it, what more needs to be done to pick a file
format? 

-- 
-- Stephe