Whitespace, continuation, and quoted strings in conf files

[Bill Davidsen]

Just a thought on continuing strings and things in configs, C and Perl
both have notations for concatenated strings, or "add to string." This
could make things easier to write, since you don't have to know if there
will be another line in the future, needing a continuation character, etc.

Since the comma separated list is most common, a notation like
  group::	news.*,comp.*
  group::	alt.fan.*

would imply adding the value to the parameter, letting the parser add a
comma if the current value were non-null. In other words, let the computer
do the work, make it easy to read and easy to write for humans.

I would also do away with the need for quotes if the string didn't contain
a blank, the blank or end of line would end values being considered. And
this would allow comments on the line, something which often makes the
config more human readable.

-- 
bill davidsen <davidsen at tmr.com>
  CTO, TMR Associates, Inc
Doing interesting things with little computers since 1979.