Another cleanup possibility - parser

[Eric S. Raymond]

Hal Murray <hmurray at megapathdsl.net>:
> 
> The current config file parser is 2 passes.  The first pass collects the info 
> in memory.  The second pass does the work.  I think that structure is 
> leftover from when it could write out the config file, but that was removed a 
> long time ago.
> 
> If we can't write it out, there is no need for a parsed copy in memory.  I'll 
> bet a lot of stuff can be simplified if the in-memory copy is eliminated.
> 
> Another quirk with the two passes is that the order and timing differs from 
> what you would probably expect.

You may be right, but this is a can of worms I am not yet wiilling to
open.

I'm not even sure abandoning the parse-tree approach would lead to
simpler code - it does have some advantages in terms of being able to
group together the processing of options that are syntactically
related.
-- 
		<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a>