Re: Ideal tag syntax; what's your take on it?

Hi Daniel,

Still nicer than JSP though ... :)  What follows is a bit of a stream
of consciousnesses  but...

I guess thought-wise I'd take one of two approaches - make it more SGML
friendly and maybe end up with GXP or align it to work more like a
programming language.

I'd prefer the latter option (and here is where I'd have to sketch it out on
paper and get back to you).  Syntax wise I'd probably shoot for something
LISP like?

[#if {condition} [
   ...
]]

And for a directive:

[@my-directive [= a b] [= x y] {arg} [

]]

I am certain this syntax is broken in many trivial examples.  One nice
feature though, is that nested statements look good (if you like lots of
brackets):

[@if [@directive {arg}, [@directive2], {arg}] [

]]

Just a crazy thought if you could fix the broken handling of that text
block...

-Mike

On Tue, Jun 7, 2011 at 6:46 PM, Daniel Dekany <[email protected]> wrote:

> Ignore backward compatibility for a moment. What would *you* prefer?
> Or if you have no idea, what aspects of the current syntax bothers you
> the most in every day work?
>
>
> A bit of mussing from me (if you care)... The most modern form of
> FreeMarker syntax is like this:
>
>  [#assign x = 1]
>  [#if something]...[/#if]
>  [@myDirective]...[/@myDirective]
>  [@myOtherDirective /]
>
> Despite that the documentation doesn't push thins syntax at all, it
> has become very popular. That tells something.
>
> My personal(?) problem with the current situation is that while FTL
> (FreeMarker Template Language) has lost a lot from its SGML-ishness
> (HTML-isness) during its history, it kept some of the not-so-good
> things from it. So I'm afraid we have ended up with a mix that's too
> far from the ideal. Let's see:
>
> How FTL is not SGML:
>
> - For starters, the attribute syntax was never like in SGML or XML.
>  This is the cause of the most frequent mistake, where people try to
>  write <@foo x="${x}" /> instead of <@foo x=x />
>
> - 2.3 introduced those odd prefixes, "#" and "@" (instead of using
>  XML-ish name-space prefixes). I don't mind this in itself, not at
>  all. It's just not SGML-ish.
>
> - And now it doesn't even use <...>, but [...].
>
> How FTL is still similar to SGML:
>
> - You have to add a "/" to each empty-directive tag ([@foo /]), but
>  you don't have to add anything if nested content follows
>  ([@foo]...). Isn't that anti-intuitive and often inconvenient?
>  Nothing but SGML has this strange upside-down logic (I think).
>
>  Also, to complicate things... there are those who are more equal
>  than others. For a built-in directive you can write something like
>  [#assign x = 1] instead of [#assign x = 1 /], since FreeMarker knows
>  if they can have nested content or not.
>
> - You don't have to put comma between named arguments. In SGML you
>  have to quote non-trivial attribute values, so it isn't an issue
>  there, but I don't think any sane modern *programming* language
>  would do this with named arguments. [@foo x = a + 1 y = b + 1] is
>  just horrible. Luckily, you can write [@foo x = a + 1, y = b + 1] in
>  FTL, but you don't have to. (As a side note, we also have
>  ambiguities because of this: <@foo x = a! y = 2> will be parsed as
>  <@foo x = a!(y == 2)>. Yeah, part of this is that FTL allows "="
>  instead of "==". That was a mistake too...)
>
> --
> Best regards,
>  Daniel Dekany
>
>
>
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