ANN: RASCL's A Simple Configuration Language

ANN: RASCL's A Simple Configuration Language

[Matt Gushee]

Here's yet another configuration language--with an OCaml library to 
process it, of course.

RASCL came into being after I investigated the Config_file library and 
found it overly complex--which may say more about me than about the 
library. But at any rate, RASCL, the language, and Rascl, the OCaml 
library attempt to be about as simple as possible for both users and 
developers, at the expense of some generality.

Here are some of the main features:

* A RASCL file may be just a sequence of keys and values, or it may
   be arbitrarily nested.
* Values may be strings, integers, floats, booleans, or lists thereof.
* No OCaml-specific types supported (that's a feature, not a bug ;-)
* Strings need not be quoted unless they contain special characters
   or would otherwise be parsed as another type.
* Two interfaces for accessing configs:
   - Dict module
   - Object system, with a CamlP4 preprocessor to generate objects
     and sample config files

BTW, I have attempted to provide thorough documentation for the language 
RASCL--in case anyone wants to implement it for other programming 
languages. However, I don't have a lot of experience writing language 
specifications, and there are probably some errors and ambiguities. I'd 
appreciate feedback from any interested and knowledgeable parties.

RASCL and Rascl may be found at:  <http://matt.gushee.net/rascl/>

-- 
Matt Gushee
: Bantam - lightweight file manager : matt.gushee.net/software/bantam/ :
: RASCL's A Simple Configuration Language :     matt.gushee.net/rascl/ :