[Lazarus] Why was XML format chosen for storing settings in Lazarus IDE?

[Marco van de Voort]

On Fri, Jun 18, 2010 at 10:55:03AM +0100, Henry Vermaak wrote:
> 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, 

I actually tried to implement this once by using [[[section]]] and
[[[subsubsection]].

There were two main problems:
- copy and paste between levels didn't work.
- you get a bit of a dangling else problem because you don't have
    closing delimiters.

Warning, this source is old (previous millenium) and serious convoluted
since one of my first attempts at OOP.  I tried to reuse one parser for both
INI files and keyword based config files.

http://www.stack.nl/~marcov/files/conffile.zip