Re: [Webmacro-devel] #templet directive

[Keats <ke...@ea...>]

I think your inference is falacious.  Many directives write to the output
stream, some use block arguments and some don't.  The #include directive
writes to the stream without a block arg.  (And of course macros do this,
but that's another issue.)

I do think that a clear distinction between "expansion" -- putting something
into the output stream, and "evaluation" -- performing some computation,
would be helpful, but I can't think of a good way to do this without
radically changing the WM syntax.

It seems like the pattern that we've developed is that you use tools or
functions for basic value transformations -- HTMLEscape, URLEncode,
Math.mod, etc -- and directives for everything else.

Better documentation would probably help here.  Perhaps a taxonomy of
directives, like:

Control flow directives:

#if/#elseif/#else
#foreach
#count

Context altering directives (variable creation):

#set
#setblock
#const/#attribute/#param
#macro
#alternate
#bean
#templet

Text expansion directives:

#include
#eval
#text

Other:

#comment
#type
#profile

Keats

----- Original Message -----
From: "Sebastian Kanthak" <seb...@mu...>
To: "Keats" <ke...@ea...>
Cc: <web...@li...>
Sent: Wednesday, June 25, 2003 3:25 PM
Subject: Re: [Webmacro-devel] #templet directive


> Hi,
>
> On Monday 23 June 2003 16:37, Keats wrote:
> > You could still do this sort of thing with the $Template tool.  People
> > didn't seem to like the template tool syntax, so I came up with the
> > directive approach which seems a bit more user friendly.
> >
> > My approach to the above would be to use a directive for the writer, say
> > #output
>
> ok, let's forget about the output thing. I only used this as an example.
Like
> Brian, I personally do not think think it is necessary, but if Lane has a
> need for it, it's ok.
>
> My problem with the #eval-directive is of a more general nature:
>
> In WebMacro we basically have to possibilities to control the result of a
> template evaluation:
>
> 1) We can insert something into the output stream. This is usually done by
a
> property reference $foo.bar
>
> 2) We can interact with the template engine and tell it to iterate certain
> blocks, chose one depending on a condition, set some properties and so on.
>
> Intuitively I think, that writing something into the output-stream (point
1)
> should be done via property references of the form $... and point 2 should
be
> done via directives.
>
> Or to put it the other way round: I believe, that directives should not
output
> anything by themselves. Of course the "#foreach" directive outputs a lot,
but
> that comes from the block inside the directive, not from the directive
> itself. The same holds for "#if" and "#set" does not output anything at
all.
>
> This is similar to the distinction between statements and expressions in
most
> programming languages. I just realized, that this is how I thought about
> directives and property-refernces until now.
>
> In this picture a #templet directive would fit quite nice, because it just
> declares a template. However, for evaluating, I would find a $... syntax
> nicer.
>
> However, I must admit, that there exists directives (like those declared
from
> macros), that do not fit in my own schema, so it is probably broken.
>
> But perhaps we can have some discussion about it: Do we have a consistent
> guideline, when to use $... syntax (via tools or macros) and when to use
> directives? I do not know of one and this is, where my confusion comes
from.
>
> Sebastian
>
> --
> Sebastian Kanthak
> PGP/GnuPG: http://www.muehlheim.de/~skanthak/pgp.html
>
>
>
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