"Read" procedure?

[Grzegorz Chrupała]

On Sat 27 Sep 2003 20:02, Denys Duchier wrote:
> grzegorz at pithekos.net (Grzegorz Chrupała) writes:
>
> No. I mean wanting to write and read records in their concrete syntax
> to a file.  This is not the way to deal with data.

I agree that in general it is not. But in some specific situations it can 
be very convenient, especially if you want a terse *human-readable and/or 
writeable* format where you can directly use many basic datatypes of your 
programming language that have a literal syntax (strings, atoms, numbers, 
lists, records etc.)

Much simpler than inventing a suitable XML format and then parsing it back. 
Also way more readable. And (I think) much easier to handle structure 
sharing and cyclic data. I mean even ozmake itself uses makefiles with an 
Oz record written in its concrete syntax. 

So if you want to do something similar to ozmake makefiles, but with more 
than one record, Lispy read is just so useful. At least it is in 
Lisp/Scheme. Maybe there are reasons I ignore that this works fine in 
Scheme but not in Oz, in which case I will just have to live with it :(

BTW I think I have found your old post on dealing with data, some good 
ideas :).

Cheers,
-- 
Grzegorz Chrupała
http://pithekos.net

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