On Mar 29, 3:13 pm, B Smith-Mannschott <bsmith.o...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I can see the advantages of going this route for simple templates that
> contain no optional elements and no repetition, but that's not going
> to get me far. I still don't understand how these kinds of issues:
>
> (defn constructor
> [{:keys [class-name fields] :as cfg}]
> [" " class-name "(" (formal-params cfg) ") {\n"
> (statement-list
> (for [f fields]
> [" this." f " = " f ]))
> " }\n"])
>
> ... are handled in the usual templating solutions without needing a
> turing complete templating language. But, at that point, I'm not sure
> what I've gained, as I already have a perfectly servicable programming
> language in Clojure. How does one really separate "content" from
> "presentation" in such a case?
Unlike a lot of people, I personally I don't see the problem as
avoiding expressiveness in the templates.
I see the problem as one of context switching between generating code
and the template. The Hiccup library does this nicely by allowing
datastructures to be the template and clojure s-expressions to be the
generating code. The cost of this is that formatting is lost -
however, this is actually a feature since the minimized output is read
by a browser rather than a human being.
There are two additional problems when generating a algol-like
programming language from within Clojure. The language itself is hard
to express within clojure and the formatting is usually important.
Because of this I would recommend a templating system that has been
specifically written to preserve formatting. If you need loops then
StringTemplate supports them.
I haven't done this within Clojure but below is small example of a C++
Cheetah template:
https://gist.github.com/892415
Although it looks a bit of a mess the general structure of the C++ is
clear and the templating code is not too intrusive.
Saul
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