5 The Future

While there’s practically no limit to the number of enhancements that could be made to Genparse, I’ll limit this section to a number of features that actually have a chance of being implemented.

• Back up output files before overwriting them. Minimally, old callback files should be saved, because those are meant to be modified by the user. This isn’t hard, but I’d like to do it "right" by encapsulating the functionality into a general-purpose file manipulation class.
• Enumerated types for strings. Currently command line strings are not checked for any sort of validity. This would allow the user to specify a list of valid values for a particular string. The syntax would probably be like an enumerated type in C.
• A way to distinguish between optional and mandatory non-option command line parameters.
• Support for more output languages. Perhaps tcl and perl first, and other scripting languages afterwards. This should be pretty easy to do since it would only require adding the appropriate member functions to the command line parameter list class and a little bit of supporting code here and there.
• Place getopt.h, getopt.c, and getopt_internal.c in a neutral shared directory so that others can copy them locally for their own use.