Re: [Webmacro-devel] Context-aware functions

[Marc P. <ma...@an...>]

On Wed, 23 Jul 2003 00:46:49 -0400, Keats <ke...@su...> wrote:

> Correction: that should have been:
>
> #foreach $varName in $varlist() {

Hmm. I appreciate your efforts on this Keats - but I'm not sure if, 
personally speaking, I like this implicit context scheme.

It makes me feel we are putting too much specialised knowledge into the 
configuration, and it also makes things harder to document for end-users - 
which is the next-generation template scripting problem Ignition is trying 
to address, namely "giving the template writer a clue about what they can 
do".

I would have thought that a cleaner way to do this would be to explicitly 
pass the context - i.e. make it available in the template (if we don't 
already - never tried it):

#foreach $varName in $varlist($Context) {

This makes it much clearer what is going on, and a self-documenting system 
can show that the functions require a context parameter and it makes sense - 
 whereas a scheme where it is implicitly passed makes this hard - the doc 
system needs to know about the implicit passing, and suppress the argument 
list. It all seems like a lot of hassle (and maintenance) for not very much 
gain.

That is, if we can get WM to expose the list of functions that are setup 
and their signatures (or Method objects).

I have a problem with Ignition right now - because WM does not seem to 
expose such config'd objects - in that I can't show help info about 
ContextTools or functions. I could read the properties myself and work it 
out but that's a hell of a lot of duplicated work.

Marc
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Marc Palmer
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