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3 points by shader 5040 days ago | link | parent

I'd be interested to know what you think of almkglor's 'w/html. It was mentioned on the related thread you posted. The interesting feature is that all tag symbols are quoted, so you don't need a php-style escape for arc code.


3 points by evanrmurphy 5040 days ago | link

I'm quite impressed, actually! In addition to the name (which in itself beats my (html (html problem), the quoting system seems smart. I'm going to have to mull this over more.

Another punctuation possibility I've considered that's different from both of these is quasi-quotation,

  (tohtml     ; another decent name
    `(body
      (h1 "Simple Math")
      (p "1 plus 1 equals " ,(+ 1 1))

  ; would generate:
  ; <body><h1>Simple Math</h1><p>1 plus 1 equals 2</p></body>nil
which would seem like a very natural way to escape into Arc. Not only does it look better, but it could get me out of using 'eval in that 'htmlf function. In fact, the more I write about this, the better it sounds. I think I'll give quasi-quotation a shot.

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3 points by shader 5040 days ago | link

I think that

  `(body
    (h1 "Simple Math")
    (p "1 plus 1 equals " ,(+ 1 1))
and

  ('body
    ('h1 "Simple Math")
    ('p "1 plus 1 equals " (+ 1 1))
are probably equivalent, though I don't know how quoting affects strings. Odds are the same system could handle both styles, which means that programmers could use whichever they prefer. Personally I like the 'tag notation for tags, but hopefully it would be flexible enough to handle both.

What's the current status of whtml.arc? I can't look at the repo right now. Does it look like something that could be used as is?

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1 point by evanrmurphy 5040 days ago | link

> probably equivalent

I agree that they seem close and are probably one macro apart from behaving the same, but they must be different since the latter throws

  Error: "Can't coerce  body fn"
while the former returns a list. I think its equivalent normal-quoted expression would have to be something more like:

  (list 'body
    (list 'h1 "Simple Math")
    (list 'p "1 plus 1 equals " (+ 1 1)))
I haven't found whtml at http://github.com/nex3/arc/tree/master/lib/ yet. I did however just stumble upon sml.arc by akkartik, which appears to be super relevant to this discussion.

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1 point by shader 5040 days ago | link

It looks like sml supports both '@ based attributes and also a form like

  (tag attr1 "value" attr2 "value"
    (bodyless-tag)
    (tag-w/body "body"))
It looks like it's function based and works on simple lists, so it would probably be conducive to the quasiquote form of escaping to arc. Anything seem to be missing from sml.arc that you wanted in your new version? Personally I think the interface could use some work, but that's about it.

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1 point by shader 5040 days ago | link

Hmm. I'll have to see if I can find it elsewhere. I guess that w/html must have been a macro that bent quotes to its own purpose, whereas marcup or your 'tohtml merely take lists as input.

sml.arc sounds familiar; I vaguely remember someone else going through a discussion similar to ours, in which SXML was also mentioned.

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1 point by akkartik 5023 days ago | link

I shouldn't get any credit for jazzdev's sml.arc: http://github.com/nex3/arc/commits/master/lib/sml.arc

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1 point by evanrmurphy 5021 days ago | link

Thanks for clarifying the authorship.

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