Ant is a build tool. As such it brings together all the components of a software project readying it for deployment.
For ease of development many tools will be used for different components of the project. Where possible Ant should be able to work alongside these so that we can use tool X and tool Y to development pieces of a project and then tie them all together with Ant. Here is a use case: I need to create database schema for oracle. So I have a bunch of sql scripts which are run with sqlplus when developing. These often require parameters so there are sqlplus tokens in the files. For these to be run in an automated manner for deployment it is necessary to do the token replacement. IMO it is Ants role to be flexible enough to fit in with tools such as sql plus. And there is no reason to restrict the token replacement to being between @ symbols. It does not simplify anything is just restricts flexiblity. Michael
