Thoughts on language-level configuration support?

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Mon, 30 Mar 2009 06:40:00 -0700, jfager wrote:

> The basic idea is that a language could offer syntactic support for
> declaring configurable points in the program.  The language system would
> then offer an api to allow the end user to discover a programs
> configuration service, as well as a general api for providing
> configuration values.

Completely coincidentally, a colleague forwarded me this cartoon about 
exposing program internals as the user interface:

http://www.ok-cancel.com/comic/4.html


I thought it was amusing, because I've seen programs just like that. Yes, 
even "GUI applications", where the developer thought that creating a user 
interface was exposing the values of internal variables to the user to 
modify directly.

How does your proposal differ from that?



-- 
Steven