the requested INI setting in that part of the Registry. If no matching entry name is found and there is an entry under the (Default) entry name, INI mapping uses that instead. Thus each section name does not need its own entry. So, in this case the profile call for the [owner] section is mapped through to: where the "name" Registry entry name is found to match the requested INI key. The value of "John Doe" is then returned to the Profile call. In this case, the @ prefix on the default prevents any reads from going to the dbsettings.ini file on disk. The result is that any settings not found in the Registry are not looked for in the INI file. The "database" Registry entry does not have the @ prefix on the value; thus, for the [database] section only, settings in the Registry are taken first followed by settings in the dbsettings.ini file on disk. Alternatives Starting with Windows 95, Microsoft began strongly promoting the use of Windows registry over the INI file. INI files are typically limited to two levels (sections and properties) and do not handle binary data well. This decision however has not been immune to critiques, due to the fact that the registry is monolithic, opaque and binary, must be in sync with the filesystem, and represents a single point of failure for the operating system. Later XML-based configuration files became a popular choice for encoding configuration in text files. XML allows arbitrarily complex levels and nesting, and has standard mechanisms for encoding binary data. More recently, data serialization formats, such as JSON, TOML, and YAML can serve as configuration formats. These three alternative formats can nest arbitrarily, but have a different syntax than the INI file. Among them, TOML most closely resembles INI, but the idea to make TOML deliberately compatible with a large subset of INI was rejected. The newest INI parsers however allow the same arbitrary level of nesting of XML, JSON, TOML, and YAML, offer equivalent support of typed values and Unicode, although keep the "informal status" of INI files by allowing multiple syntaxes for expressing the same thing. See also BOOT.INI MSConfig Sysedit SYSTEM.INI TOML, a very similar but more formally-specified configuration file format WIN.INI Amiga's IFF files .DS_Store .properties References Infobox - http://filext.com/file-extension/INI Infobox - https://wikiext.com/ini External links libconfini's Library Function Manual: The particular syntax allowed by libconfini.