[ANN] tconfpy 1.186 Released And Available

[Tim Daneliuk]

'tconfpy' Version 1.185 is now released and available for download at:

          http://www.tundraware.com/Software/tconfpy

The last public release was 1.184 (4-27-2004)


This release fixes a bug that incorrectly reported syntax errors
within literal blocks found inside False conditionals.  The bug
was benign but noisy, so a new release was dropped to fix it.

Complete details can be found in the WHATSNEW.txt file included in the
distribution.

Users are strongly encouraged to join the tconfpy-users mailing list as
described in the documentation.


What Is 'tconfpy'?
------------------

'tconfpy' is an advanced configuration file parser and validator for
Python programs.  By using 'tconfpy', Python programmers can provide
their users with an external configuration file for setting program
options, defining defaults, and so on.  'tconfpy' offloads the
responsibility for parsing and validating a configuration file from
the main application. The Python programmer need only deal
with the results and any errors or warnings generated during the
parsing process.

'tconfpy' recognizes a rich configuration language and provides a
number of sophisticated programming features including:

     - The ability to breakup large configurations into smaller pieces
       via the '.include' directive.

     - Support for string substitution and concatenation throughout the
       configuration file via string variables.  Variables may be
       locally declared, a reference to a symbol already in the
       symbol table, or a reference to an environment variable.

     - A complete set of conditional directives for selective
       processing of configuration options. Both existential ("If
       variable exists ...") and comparison ("if string equals/does not
       equal string ...") forms are provided, as is an '.else'
       directive.

     - The ability to instantiate program options prior to reading a
       configuration file and make them mandatory by declaring those
       options as Read-Only.

     - Optional type validation to ensure that a user enters a value
       appropriate for boolean, integer, floating point, string, or
       complex data.

     - Optional value validation to ensure that a configuration option
       is either within a specified range or one of an enumerated set
       of possible values.  For configuration options which are string
       types, 'tconfpy', can optionally specify min/max string lengths
       and enumerate a set of legitimate regular expressions that the
       string must match.

     - The ability to define an arbitrary number of lexical namespaces.

     - The ability to use the various features of 'tconfpy' as a pre-
       processor for any other text (including source code for other
       programming languages and Python itself) via the '.literal'
       directive.

     - The ability to "template" classes of variables, thereby predefining
       the type and value restrictions for such variables.  This makes
       'tconfpy' useful as a building block for data validation tools.

     - An optional debug capability which returns detailed information
       about each line parsed.

     - Includes a test driver program for learning how to program with
       'tconfpy' and for debugging and testing your own configuration
       files.

     - Comes with approximately 40 pages of documentation including a
       Programmer's API Reference and a User's Guide to the 'tconfpy'
       configuration language.  Documentation is provided in several
       formats including Unix 'man', Plain Text, html, pdf, and
       Postscript.

'tconfpy' is a Pure Python module and is platform-independent.
It should work identically on any platform on which Python runs.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tim Daneliuk
tundra at tundraware.com