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application init files



At some point I read that one motivation behind the Guile project is the
standardization of application init files.  That is, the proliferation of
strange init file syntax could be stopped if a means were available to read
structured data stored using a parenthesized S-expression notation, which
incidentally could be easily read by Scheme.  A simple C library could also be
written to read S-expressions, when embedding a full Scheme interpreter in an
application is not a good idea.
 
Has anyone worked on a specification for either of these ideas?
 
I am faced with a work project right now where one application reads several
init files, and each uses its own bizarre syntax.  The situation is really
bothering me, since at my last job, my programs stored data on disk as the
print representation of Scheme association lists.
 
The C library I used before allowed me to read an S-expressions from a file
and interpret the data as a list or dictionary.  It was implemented in C on
top of Guile and in Java on top of Kawa, so it was a bit of an overkill for
reading init files.  Nevertheless, it did standardize and simplify the job of
reading application initialization files.
 
                                bob