Re: [Freemarker-devel] Ideal tag syntax; what's your take on it?

Friday, June 10, 2011, 1:49:13 PM, Daniel Henrique Alves Lima wrote:

[snip]
>>   [#foo :]
>>     ...
>>   [#.]
>>
>>   or [#. foo], optionally.
>>
>>   
>
> How about
>
> #foo [aaaaaaa
> aaaaa#if condition [aaaaa
> aaaa
> ]aaaa
> ]aaaa
>
> Or perhaps as cryptic as Velocity (sometimes).

You are marching towards the WebMacro-ish syntax here. My main problem
with them is that "]" (or "}", the more usual choice) isn't very much
visible in the middle of the static text. Where that's not a problem,
WebMacro-ish syntaxes rock though (and here see my comment regarding
multiple syntaxes). The fact that a mere "]" has special meaning also
complicates matters. In WebMacro (where it was "}", not "]") it did
cause headaches. That problem can be handled well if you do allow "]"
in static text as far as it has a "[" pair in static text, in which
case the parser understands that the "[" and "]" are just static text.
Of course it raises the need for vertical-flow-statements (my term for
it...) like:

  #vIf condition [
    [ <- static, not printed if condition is flase
      #vEndIf [
        static, always printed
      ]
    ] <- static, not printed if condition is flase
  ]

but those are handy even if you have no syntactical problems, so
that's not a problem in itself.

-- 
Best regards,
 Daniel Dekany


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