Ben Finney wrote:
The metadata being discussed is static. What's at issue is how that metadata should be encoded: in an imperative language (like a Python program file) or a declarative language (like a ConfigParser file).
I'm not sure that exactly expresses the distinction either. Depending on exactly what you understand by "declarative", a program writtenin a functional language can be considered purely declarative, yet it can be impossible to tell what it will do without running it. I think what people mean here by "static" is more like "can be elaborated without requiring non-trivial amounts of computation". Not just to minimise the amount of work a tool using the config file needs to do, but also to ease the task of debugging it when things don't work properly. -- Greg _______________________________________________ Distutils-SIG maillist - Distutils-SIG@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig
