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Date: Sat, 27 Aug 2011 18:20:54 +0400
From: Solar Designer <solar@...nwall.com>
To: john-dev@...ts.openwall.com
Subject: Re: #include "john.conf2"  (a wish list item)

On Fri, Aug 26, 2011 at 07:24:57PM -0400, David Jones wrote:
> I think it would be better to establish a formal escape syntax to identify comments that aren't really comments, such as ##!include rather than just #include.

I am not sure whether we want these directives to look like comments at
all or maybe not.  What are our reasons to make them comment-like?  Just
that it's the way it's done in the C preprocessor?  OK, I identified one
more reason - not introducing a new character that may sometimes need to
be escaped.

What do we want older versions of JtR to do when they see an include
directive - silently ignore it (treat as comment) or complain about it?
If it's the latter, then we need to use a different syntax, not
comment-like.  But what syntax?  If we use something like:

[Include:File-or-Section]

it will just be treated as a new section start by an older version of
JtR - not what we want.  If we use some new syntax like:

include "file"
include [section]

or:

{Include "file"}
{Include [section]}

it will not always be detected as an error by older versions of JtR -
depending on what section it's in.  Also, it might introduce a new
character that may sometimes need to be escaped.

Yet this might be the best we can do.  Any other ideas?

Alexander

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