Re: Default to quiet references

On Wednesday, November 27, 2002, at 03:25 PM, Serge Knystautas wrote:

> Peter Romianowski wrote:
> > This is bordering on the undesired feature that you can't tell what 
> > the syntax means from looking at the code.
> > Some feel (I'm 50/50) that if you see $!foo, that it should do one 
> > thing, not be controlled by some outside switch. +1 on that. It would 
> > mess up things. If you need such a feature
> > you should do something like Andy Lee supposed.
> > Just my $0.02
> > Peter
>
> Yeah, I'd have to agree after thinking about it for exactly that 
> reason... you can't know the syntax just from the code.
>
> I'll just do my best to educate users why they need to put $! 
> everywhere.

The problem is, it might not be needed *everywhere*. For instance, 
suppose you want to put a label when some variable is undefined, as in 
"N/A".

I have a macro #isnull($var, "default") that I use in the cases that 
silencing is not really appropriate:

#macro (isnull $x $dflt)
        #if ($x) $x
        #else $dflt
        #end
#end

HTH,
Matías.