On Fri, Dec 31, 2010 at 8:57 AM, Michael Snoyman
I thought I would start this in a separate thread. Right now in Hamlet, $foo.bar.baz$ (or equivalently $foo bar baz$ gets converted to the Haskell code "foo (bar baz)". This makes a fair bit of sense for the period-delimited syntax, but feels very wrong for the space-delimited syntax. So the question is: should we change things around? That would mean we would need to modify our current templates to include extra parentheses, eg:
$foo.bar.baz$ -> $foo (bar baz)$ $a.b.c.d$ -> $a (b (c d))$
I suppose that, in theory, if we actually change the variable interpolation character to a percent sign, we could take back the dollar sign to work like Haskell, eg:
$a.b.c.d$ -> %a $ b $ c d%
And just since I brought *that* up: we could consider using a different symbol for variable interpolation than the percent sign, such as a hash or ampersand. However, both of those already have special meaning (hash == id, ampersand == HTML escape character), so I don't know how well that would work. There was talk once upon a time of merging the syntax for dollar-sign and caret interpolation, which now that we've added some more polymorphism it might be possible.
Caveat: I haven't actually written any code for this, so I don't know how feasible it is. I'm basically throwing out ideas as they come to me.
Michael
HAML uses #{some haskell here} for interpolation (which is ruby syntax). HAML implementations in other languages stayed with that. We could too. Is it really impossible to just use the plaintext as code in Template Haskell? It would really be nice if you could use any bit of Haskell wherever you can use a variable (but it's just nice-to-have, not worth playing with GHC's code just to get it). If it is impossible, I'm all for $ doing what it's supposed to... but that way lies reimplementing Haskell parsing, and I'm not sure you want to go there (we'll add more and more requests as we got more and more syntax...)