Re: [AD] Allegro, config file routines addition

[Grzegorz Adam Hankiewicz <gradha@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, 24 Jun 2000, Charles Bilyue' wrote:

> Greetings to you... was writing some config file loading routines, and I
> wanted a feature not too dissimilar to classic Windows boolean INI file
> entries. 

Hi, I would like to criticise this patch a little bit:

1) Instead of using stricmp use ustricmp.
2) There's no need for a temporal variable. If (!strcmp, whatever)
   then return already.
3) I generally dislike boolean variables, they have always existed with 0
   being false and any other value meaning true. Just look what the
   function returns. This is just a personal opinion...
4) And the thing which most worries me is that there's a multilingual
   problem with such a function, you have to stick to english texts, which
   is bad now that Allegro supports UTF-8 easily and customizable
   multilanguage text strings via config routines or custom ones.

2 and 3 aren't really an issue, 1 should be taken care of, and in order to
get 4, I would expect the routine to look up the text strings in
language.dat, so everybody can customize them. There could be a config
variable named true_text = YES:TRUE:ON, and false_text = NO:FALSE:OFF. You
would need to write then an initialization string which puts somewhere
these values around so you can use them in a loop using ustricmp inside
your function.

But, then there's a conflict itself in supporting multilanguage boolean
texts, and that is, a game configured for english will write it's
config/ini file, but if I change it to use spanish, the config file won't
work at all, returning all variables as false given the last atoi.

That's again why I think (number 3) boolean variables are evil. Any
comments? I might be too worried with such a thing, anyway users don't
tend to switch languages on the fly...

 Grzegorz Adam Hankiewicz   gradha@xxxxxxxxxx - http://gradha.infierno.org
 Other web pages:  http://glub.ehu.es/  -  http://welcome.to/gogosoftware/