Re: TT's support for methods and complex structures. Why not?

On Mon, 18 Jul 2005, Mark Stosberg wrote:

> In the current CGI::Application scheme, we solve this with mix-ins and
> hooks for callbacks at various points. H::T seems rather mature already,
> and I'm not suggesting making these kind of extensions to it. This seems
> like a case where modifying the core strikes me as reasonable.

I think I'd take a patch to add a callback system like CGI::App has.
I doubt it would be hard at all.

> > Yes, I think that would be the easiest way.  HTML::Template::Expr
> > exploits code-ref variables to offer function calls, so why not
> > methods too?
> 
> Are you suggesting that the method technique may make sense to add to
> HTML::Template::Expr ? 

Possibly.  The bar for new features in ::Expr is pretty low.  There's
already so much in there not to like that a little more can't hurt!

> The template system has to know what 'defined' means here to parse it. 
> I'm suggesting:
> 
>  <TMPL_IF foo.is_defined>
> 
> As now, we just need to check to see if we have "foo" to use, and
> quickly check to see to if it's a object or a complex data structure to
> see what to do with the bit after the dot.

I really dislike systems that try to collapse hash dereferences and
method calls into a single syntax.  Petal does this and it drives me
nuts - I can never figure out what I'm looking at from the template.
And it does matter because methods may have side-effects and hash
derefs don't.

-sam


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