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List:       ruby-talk
Subject:    Re: delaying string evaluation
From:       Navindra Umanee <navindra () cs ! mcgill ! ca>
Date:       2005-07-17 16:49:20
Message-ID: 20050717124916.A22564 () cs ! mcgill ! ca
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Ara.T.Howard <Ara.T.Howard@noaa.gov> wrote:
> i generally wrap the 'beating' of data with something like

Aha, but this is just the beginning.  I was impressed by Amrita when I
first looked at the table example, but the more complex stuff you have
to do, the more contortions you have to suffer.  To do an arbitrary
text substitution, you have to begin using these ugly <span>
statements, for example, and to substitute attributes you have to use
some other indirect stuff to describe them...  but all this is easy
compared to what you have to do for complex control flow and
computation.

Development has in fact stopped on Amrita, as far as I can tell.  Now
it's Amrita2 which allows you to use ERB... and you're back to square
one with an uncomfortable mix of different syntaxes.  Essentially I
think this is a tacit admission that the Amrita approach is not powerful
enough on its own, or really it is just too clunky.  Then there is the
horror that is Template Spec.

I could have it all wrong of course, having never used Amrita.
However when I start thinking about how I'm going to convert all my
"just do it in Ruby" code to Amrita, I get a nice little headache.  

My Ruby HTML code generation does recursive tree traversals, has
special conditions, it has counters keeping track of nesting levels
that it uses for later substitions in the code it is building.  It's
complex stuff doing complex things, but I "just do it" because it
really is straightforward Ruby coding.  There's nothing magic about
recursion or counters.

On the other hand, I haven't the faintest idea how I would approach
that in Amrita.  I imagine I would have to do all the work on some
external data structures and then somehow apply it to a template.
It's just an extra indirection and extra work...  for what really?  A
performance hit at runtime?  Amrita just feels like a mental
straitjacket to me.

I too, like you, am attracted to the idea of separating HTML template
code from Ruby code.  I can't quite think of a way of doing this that
is actually worthwhile when getting down to the more complex stuff.

:-)

Cheers,
Navin.

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