<font color="#0000ff"> I know XML was only released a few weeks ago, and it's new-fangled and all, but you'd have thought they might have at least considered it for tnsnames.ora by now.</font>
Hey, got another idea, how about we give it a kind of goofy LISP-like format? Miss a paren? Guess what ain't going to work for you?!
Hey another good one- easy way to sell those Oracle Professional Services guys- let's make it easy to install the client to a different location on accident and let's make it so that you have to guess which TNSNAMES.ora is actually being used at the moment!
And then, just to piss people off, let's change core filenames a lot. You're all familiar with TNSPing.exe? Great! Let's make it TNSPing80.exe! Now we're talking. THEN- just to make it easy for the people selling software that's expected to be generically used with no particular version of Oracle, let's change all the client access DLL's with each version! Orcl can bankrupt the ISV's that use their data access lib's through their helpdesks!