Re: the "Cheetah files" (part 1)

Mike Orr wrote:

(...)
> It sounds like to do exactly what you'd want would require a new
> directive.  But I can't think of any way that's cleaner than the 
>
> #if <UL> #for <LI> #end for </UL> #else Sorry, Charlie! #end if
>
> model you posted.  The ifNotMessage could be multiline too, so
> it doesn't fit easily into a directive attribute.  
infact the #for / #unless trick works just fine for my purposes
that's why i posted it to the ML.

> #for could grow a section for "if list is empty", but we can't call
> it #else because Python uses that clause for another purpose. 
yeah, where sequence is "naturally exhausted" else: block is called.

> And we don't want Python-lookalike directives behaving differently than
> in Python.  
it would be definitely a bad thing.

> And actually implementing an "if empty" portion in #for
> would be a lot of work.  Since the "list" can be any iterable, you'd
> have to prefetch the first element specially and do something different
> if it didn't exist.  And even if we did this, there's no place for
> <UL> and </UL> -- not unless we added two more #for portions for
> "before" and "after".  It starts getting really complicated, and a
> standard #for combined with #if/else or #unless starts looking the
> epitome of readability by comparision.

this is something it could be implemented in version 2.0 of the
template system. maving from python-like statemenet to a more rule-based 
machinery, like zope's TAL or mozilla's XUL:

http://www.xulplanet.com/tutorials/xultu/templates.html

but this really would distort cheetah philosophy a lot. having rules
like #ifempty would look a bit strange. :)

later,
deelan




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