FYI, I don't know if you've come any further along with your parser,
but I've rewritten mine, again, and I consider it very nearly feature
complete at this stage.  I've attached a little demonstration utility
that understands some of the format of the readers.conf.  The parser
files are readers.[ch], and are generated from readers.g by my parser
generator, tentatively titled GUCS.  If you don't get the tarball,
it's also available on my FTP site,
ftp://ftp.jalacy.com/pub/src/gucs-inn-demo.tgz

I hope that this brings across how easy it is in GUCS to support
recursion, include files, and basic configuration support.  There are
a few things that you may view as shortcomings, though...
1) it's much more CPU-intensive than a configuration system needs to
   be.  Configuration happens rarely enough that I didn't really care
   to sully my logical model with optimization.
2) it's procedural.  Code blocks associated with parts of the syntax
   are executed when that syntax element is encountered.  I don't
   consider this a drawback, but it means that there can't be any
   GUCS-local support for saving a config file that's been edited by
   a graphical utility...  Support for that kind of thing has to be
   allowed for explicitly by whoever writes the .g files.
3) Argument passing is kind of funny...  Arguments to realm/abstract
   types are only accessible in their start/finish code blocks, which
   may be a bit awkward.
4) Error reporting is difficult.  At this point, though, I doubt I'll
   change any of the main ideas involved.
5) The config files parsed by GUCS generated .c files are not 100%
   backwards compatible with INN's, currently.  Without knowing if
   you'd like to use this, that wasn't a priority, but I believe the
   incompatibilities can be almost completely fixed.
6) The parser-generator itself is incomplete, and relies on some
   functions that may not be portable.  (asprintf(), at least.)

If this is something you think INN would benefit from having, let me
know...  I started the project partly because I felt guilty about the
readers.conf implementation, and I'd like to try and make up for that.

--aidan
-- 
Aidan Cully         "Chihuahuahuahuahua."
Not Panix Staff       --The Sugercubes
aidan@panix.com


-- Binary/unsupported file stripped by Listar --
-- Type: application/x-tar-gz