> Well, since you mention that Freezethaw wasn't available, I assume > installing from CPAN isn't an option - if it is, you could check out > YAML: > > http://perladvent.org/2002/15th/
Thanks, Robin. This is an excellent reference for me. It shows me how to use eval to get the data back (and slurp a whole file in one line). I'm coming back to Perl after years away (I was a perl4 newbie many years ago). I would really prefer not to have to install anything from CPAN. This is because this is an existing program and it may make the upgrade procedure harder as well as build up walls of resistence to my idea :-). When it comes down to it, I really like the idea of having the full language available at configuration time. This allows configurers (with their programmer cap on) to declare constants, look up data in other places (rdbms maybe) and generally reuse their configuration data and avoid repitition. This is my case against markup languages for configuration data. However, this doesn't solve the cross-language problems but I don't care too much about that. I guess I could write a Perl program to slurp my configuration file and spit out the appropriate Java/Python/Ruby definition. In this senario, I can never rid myself of the Perl interpreter though - but that's ok. In my work environment Perl is the most common scripting language. >From what I see of YAML, I like it. Much smaller and neater than other markup >languages I've seen :-) I found the front page here http://yaml.org/. Thanks for sending me a more useful reference. It was a big help. Cheers, Steve. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
