[htmltmpl] TT's support for methods and complex structures. Why not?

[Mark S. <ma...@su...>]

I hope this isn't a broken-record question.

There are a couple features of TT that seem reasonable to support, and
seem at first glance like things that an be added while maintaining
compatibility.

1. Support for complex data structures. Flattening is no longer necessary
   to do a separate step. It's like H::T users are able to skip this
   step anyway. We either do it by hand, or use something like
   Data::Grouper.

   In TT, if you give it a hashref that looks like { a => { b => c} }

   Then you can directly access "c" as "a.b.c". 

   I like that.

2. Method calls. In TT you can pass this into your template:   
  
   shopcart => My::Cool::Shopping::Cart->new(),

   And then access methods on the shopping cart object like this

   shopcart.total 


To me, these additions wouldn't violate the integrity of H::T's
philosophy, which I interpret as being about keeping the tag language as
simple as possible.

They simply give the programmers more power and freedom expression, and
can help prevent extra hoop jumping when you have an complex data
structure or an object that need to hook up with the template anyway.

    Mark