Talk:ConfigurationFileFormat

This proposal for a configuration file format looks similar to what was done with geant and gexace.

Personally, I think XML is an inappropriate format for this job. It might be a good idea to talk to Gobo (Eric Bezault) about his experience with those tools.

Among the problems:

XML is very verbose, and while it can be read by a human, it's not very easy to read. In this respect it's much worse than Ace files.

To solve configuration problems, you need all the basics of a programming language: input, output, state, conditionals, and iteration. Using XML to represent these often becomes kludgy. Look at the effort that goes into solving what should be fairly simple if conditions.

I think it would be far better to evolve the Ace file specification, perhaps into a subset of Eiffel that allows us to write a clear, declarative specification of a system without a lot of <tag>s and </tags> and obtuse rules.