On Fri, May 12, 2006 at 10:50:15AM -0700, Jason Thorpe wrote:
> 
> On May 11, 2006, at 10:48 PM, Pavel Cahyna wrote:
> 
> >What about the old NeXTSTEP (is it NeXTSTEP?) text format? If human
> >readability and editability is a concern, I think it is much more
> >human-readable and editable. (Imagine using property lists for the  
> >kernel
> >command line - entering a property list in the boot loader would be  
> >much
> >easier in the NeXTSTEP format than in the XML format.)
> 
> The old-style plist format used by OpenStep cannot represent  
> numbers.  From the reference you cite:
> 
> ASCII property lists support the four primary property list data  
> types: NSString (java.lang.String in Java), NSData, NSArray, and  
> NSDictionary. Additionally, NSDate and NSNumber objects can be  
> archived, but will become strings when unarchived.

Supporting numbers would need just a small modification in the format.
Let's interpret unquoted string 123 as a number, and a quoted one "123" as
a string.

Pavel