Hi, I need to develop a program that is used by engineers to design bridges according to different codes of practice. The requirement is to dream up a solution that would allow us/the user to include a new code of practice without recompiling the source code. This would be fairly easy if the these codes of practice contained just constants (numbers); however they also contain rules consisting of logical and mathematical expressions (e.g. "if the lane width is less that 2.5 meters, use a factor of 0.9" - here the "lane width" would be an input data and 2.5 and 0.9 would be constants). I was thinking of placing these constants and rules in a file somewhere, so that the user can modify it as he wish. But how could I deal with the expressions for the rules? I am not familiar with XML, would that help? Any ideas? Thanks a lot.
Billy
