Re: Patch and test to allow component calls

>>2. Allowing the closing tag to either be empty or to match the exact
>>path, or a subset of the exact path. Dave R felt the parsing would be
>>too complicated, and also didn't like having two closing tag syntaxes.
> 
> 
> The users *want* two syntaxes.  I think we should listen.
> 
> They want it for (1) self-documentation, and (2) syntax-validation to
> verify the end tag matches what they think it should.
> 
> I think we can give them that with trivial parsing if we just match
> verbatim up to the first comma.  That means in the slightly non-trivial
> case of <& $foo, %ARGS &> we are matching q{$foo} instead of the contents
> of $foo.  For complex cases such as <& fee($foe,$fum) &> we should
> recommend that they use </&> instead, since it will be there for backward
> compatibility anyway.

I'm in favor of the full end tag syntax if it can actually be used for 
syntax-validation (as opposed to the arbitrary comment text that Alex is 
pushing for).

The Mason compiler already makes an explicit distinction between literal 
strings or Perl expressions in <& &> and <&| &>. From 
http://masonhq.com/docs/manual/Devel.html#components_that_output_html:

    comp_path may be a literal string (quotes optional) or a Perl
    expression that evaluates to a string. To eliminate the need for
    quotes in most cases, Mason employs some magic parsing: If the
    first character is one of [\w/_.], comp_path is assumed to be a
    literal string running up to the first comma or &>. Otherwise,
    comp_path is evaluated as an expression.

So how about this: If a <&| &> tag contains a literal string as defined 
above, then you can use either </&> or </& LITERAL>, where LITERAL is 
the exact literal they specified. Otherwise, they can only use </&>. 
This is mostly as John suggested, except that we don't let them use </&> 
for expressions.

I'm assuming that literals are vastly more common than expressions in 
<&| &> tags, so this should give Alex what he wants in most cases. 
Except that he won't be able to stick long diary entries in his </&> tag.

What do you think?

Jon




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