New built-ins (`?whatever` things)... any opinions/ideas?

I'm planning to add some new buildins to FreeMarker 2.3.x. I'm not
sure which of these will go to the next release, but certainly not all
of them (lack of time...). I would like to hear some opinions, or
ideas regarding better names and semantics. Also regarding what other
built-ins you miss.

boolExp?chose(whenTrue, whenFalse)

  This one is instead of Java's ternary operator (exp ? exp : exp), that
  FTL can't have due to syntactical reasons. Of course, the operators
  are evaluated on demand. It's like #if/#else, but it's an expression.

n?until(m[, step=1])
n?to(m[, step=1])
  These would deprecate the ".." operator, which was sadly
  mis-designed back then. They create a numerical range, always with
  step 1 (not -1) unless `step` was provided. "until" has exclusive end,
  "to" has inclusive end.

s?safe_substring(from[, to])

  Same as ?substring, but ignores out-of-ranges

n?char

  Converts UCS codepoint to character. Like 65?char is 'A'.

n?abs
  Absolute value

n?[bin|[j]hex|oct]_[8|16|32|64]
  That is ?bin_8, ?bin_16, ..., hex_8, hex_16. The difference between
  "hex" and "jhex" is tat the last prints with a 0x prefix.

n?is_nan, n?is_infinity
  Works only for numbers, tells if the wrapped number is float or
  double NaN or Infinitiy (positive or negative).

exp1?followed_by(exp2)

  This returns exp1 + exp2, but only if both are defined and are
  non-0-length strings. This is useful in situations like these:

    <title>Foo bar<#if extraTitle??> - ${extraTitle}</#if></title>

  or

    <#if statement??>${statement};</#if>

  That is, you want to print an optional variable and when it exists,
  you also want to print something before or after it. These would
  become to:

    <title>Foo bar${' - '?followed_by(extraTitle)}</title>

    ${statement?followed_by(';')}

min/max:

  I wonder how to add min/max functions. `n?min(m)` looks silly IMO.
  It could be `.min(n, m)` instead, where the initial dot is for the
  special-variable syntax (used for .data_model, .version and like).
  Only it's something most user don't know...

exp?dump
exp?dump_as_text

  Prints the value for debugging purposes. ?dump would print it as
  XHTML, while dump_as_text as text/plain.

-- 
Best regards,
 Daniel Dekany


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