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+libmspdatafile - structured datafile library
+Copyright © 2006-2007  Mikko Rasa, Mikkosoft Productions
+Version 0.1 readme
+
+
+Libmspdatafile is a library for reading and writing structured data files.  It
+supports both a human-readable text format and a more compact binary format.
+The text-based format is designed to be compact yet clean, avoiding much of the
+redundancy of XML.
+
+Libmspdatafile is distributed under the terms of the GNU Lesser Public License.
+Full text of the license can be found in the file License.txt.
+
+
+*** Structure
+
+The basic building block of a datafile is a statement.  A statement has a
+keyword and zero or more arguments.  It may also have zero or more substate-
+ments.
+
+The interface is heavily object-oriented and typically one statement in a file
+represents one object in the program's memory.
+
+The library supports five basic data types: integers, floats, strings, booleans
+and enums.  Data types are strictly enforced - the only allowed conversion is
+from float to integer.
+
+The correct argument types for a statement is determined from the function or
+variable used to load it.  This means that semantical validation can only be
+done by the program that actually uses the file.  A generic tool can only
+perform syntactic validation.
+
+
+*** Basic usage
+
+Loading data from files is achieved through Loader classes.  Such a class must
+be derived from the DataFile::Loader class.  In the constructor, a series of
+calls to the various overloads of the add() function is executed, telling the
+loader what to do.  The two basic actions are calling a function of the loader
+with the statement's arguments, or assigning the arguments to variables of the
+loaded object.
+
+There is a load() function in namespace scope that allows loading a whole file
+into an object.
+
+It is also possible to call the Parser::parse function directly and obtain a
+raw Statement.  However, this is rarely useful.
+
+
+*** Syntax
+
+The syntax of the text format vaguely resembles C.  Statements are terminated
+with a semicolon and substatements are enclosed between burly braces.  The sub-
+statement block comes after all arguments and the semicolon comes after it.  An
+empty substatement block is allowed and equal to an absent block.
+
+Integers can be written in decimal, octal or hexadecimal notation.  A minus
+sign can be used in any base for negative numbers, as well as an optional plus
+sign for positive numbers.
+
+Floats must be written in decimal and they must contain a decimal point.  An
+exponent may come after the mantissa, separated by the character e.  Minus and
+plus signs are allowed in both exponent and mantissa.
+
+Strings are enclosed in double quotes.  Backslash can be used to escape a
+literal double quote or backslash.
+
+Booleans are either true or false.
+
+Enumeration values are represented as symbolic identifiers.  They may contain
+alphaumeric characters and underscores and must begin with a letter or an
+underscore.
+
+
+*** Binary format
+
+The binary format is not intended to be manipulated by anything else than
+libmspdatafile.  A detailed description is not available at this time.
+
+The tool provided with the library can be used to convert between the two
+formats.
+
+
+*** $Id$