INN config file parsing infrastructure

Bill Davidsen davidsen at tmr.com
Thu May 4 11:58:02 UTC 2000


On Sun, 30 Apr 2000, Marco d'Itri wrote:

> I think this is confusing. This behaviour is very non intuitive, when
> UNIX programs implement \-escaping the \\n sequence is usually special
> cased.

I don't know if we want to introduce whole escape sequences in this, seems
like over solving the config problem. But I think the trailing \ could be
a problem, having seen a few cases over the years where a trailing blank
got added and the action was then NOT what was expected.

> 
>  >Semicolons inside quotes don't terminate the value, of course.  Finally,
>  ># (outside of a quoted value) begins a comment that lasts to the end of
>  >the line.  The parser should be able to handle lines of arbitrary length.
> Maybe C and C++ comments should be supported too, like BIND does.
> I think C comments are useful because they allow to quickly comment
> whole blocks.

I think this is over-solving the problem again. And use of C comments to
invalidate whole blocks is highly dangerous in any case, all it takes is a
single comment in the block to give another non-intuitive result.

I would leave multi-line comments totally out. This is supposed to be easy
to write correctly I hope, and comments to the end of the line are always
unambiguous.

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




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