[Lazarus] New website www.lazarussupport.com launched

[Joost van der Sluis]

On 18 June 2010 10:15, Graeme Geldenhuys <graemeg.lists at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Now both examples contain the same information, but lets be honest..
> Which one is easier to read (via human or program), manually tweak if
> needed via human in IDE screws up, takes up less disk space.

The ini file is easier to read when it's small, but it's limited in
obvious ways.  Xml makes hierarchies very clear.  You can't put
sections inside sections in an ini file, so you have to resort to
other hacks and tricks, which you would have to parse manually.  Most
people just tend to flatten it out, which you did in your example.
With this solution you need to combat duplicate names, say, for
example there was a UseAnsiStrings tag in another block in the
CompilerOptionsParsing block.  You would've had to add some prefix,
which in time will make the ini more unreadable.

> I fully understand that XML has it's place in data transport and helps
> describe complex data. But using XML for something as simple as
> storing a few application settings. It just seems very inappropriate
> in this case, and a classic example of over-engineering.

Possibly.  I tend to store app settings in an ini file, but it's not a
very scalable solution, as Jaqui suggested.

Henry