[Chicken-users] Store data as text in scm files

[mfv]

Hello, 

I am not yet through with the many nice scheme lang sources - however, I am
a bit puzzled on what would be the best way to store data. At the moment, I
refrain from using a database such a sqlite. This also applies for
parsing/writing binary data, although that is on my to-do/to-learn list in the
future.


I have come up with a couple of solutions. It strikes me that it is really
elegant to have a language were code is data. 

However, I am yet undecided what would be the best solution to follow. 

So, the examples are: 

;; 1) store as scheme code/data
(list
        "Joe Jackson"    ; id
        (list "person" "X" "Y") ; some metadata
        (list 1 728 2812) ; telepone number etc
        (list "address@hidden") ; email
        (list "S street" "T Town" "C Country") ; address data
)

But how to store data in such a way? By using a macro? 


;; 2) store as evaluated code/data
("Joe Jackson" ("person" "X" "Y") (1 728 2812) ("address@hidden") ("S
street" "T Town" "C Country"))

Again, I am not sure how the actual implentation of writing data would be.

As for reading, I would read the parse the text file (e.g. by reading \n 
separated string
entries) and assign the text directly to a code structure. This would happen
a la (define somedata (<read-in-data>)) - or make hash-tables out of them,
etc.


;; 3) store as text to be parsed by a parser
"Joe Jackson"
        "person" "X" "Y"
        1 728 2812
        "address@hidden"
        "S street" "T Town" "C Country"

The least practical solution, as it requires to write a parser.


Could someone give some hints or point me to recources were I could read more 
about this
subject.

Cheers!

  mfv