Config parsing (2/4): Proposed syntax

[Russ Allbery]

Jeffrey M Vinocur <jeff at litech.org> writes:
> On 10 May 2001, Russ Allbery wrote:

>> Strings can be continued on multiple
>> lines by ending each line in a backslash.

>> [...]

>> In addition, any line beginning with "#", optionally preceeded by
>> whitespace, is regarded as a comment and discarded before parsing.  The
>> line must begin with "#" (and optional whitespace); comments at the end of
>> lines aren't permitted.  Comments are removed prior to parsing and
>> therefore aren't represented in the above grammar.

> Can we get a clarification on the interaction of these two?  That is,
> should the line following a line which begins with "#" and ends with "\"
> be considered part of the comment or not.

> (I believe it should be 'no', but we probably should specify explicitly)

Answered in the other message, but this also pointed out that there was
another interaction that I wasn't specifying; the above language implies
that something like:

    parameter: "value \
# hmm, what's this
rest of string"

has a comment in the middle of it, which I don't think is the right
approach.  And in looking at solving that, I discovered that it actually
wasn't that bad to just put the comments directly into the grammar,
because it already so happened that comments were allowed exactly where
*WHITE was.

So I've now made that change in my version.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>