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Re: application init files


> Date: Wed, 28 Jan 98 19:53:53 -0500
> From: "Robert E. Brown" <brown@bibliotech.com>
> Sender: owner-guile@cygnus.com
> 
> 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.

This is an interesting idea.  A reader for sexp initialization files
could be pulled out of just about any Scheme or Lisp system -- it
doesn't necessarily need to be Guile's.

But, depending on your needs, limiting initialization file syntax to
sexps might not be so useful.  It's nice to be able to set
configuration variables based on dynamic run-time characteristics,
which can't typically be done unless you have the power of a real
language at your disposal.  For example: a newsreader can select an
NNTP server based on the user's name or the name under which the
program was invoked.  Emacs users often set certain configuration
options depending on whether X11 is running at the time of startup.
And so on.

So it might be handy to promote the use of sexp syntax for
initialization files, but the long-range benefits aren't too clear to
me.

love, T.