Anyway, fully understanding the current approaches and getting them to work correctly and conveniently is a pragmatic first step to any progress ;-)
I have created JIRAs 2814 and 2819, addressing the current problems of DSL
parsing and expansion, and I've mailed three reworked source files to Edson, but I can't handle the parser. (Also, I don't know for some of the "relics" in the code intend to implement in the first place.)
Longer term, I wonder whether our DSL syntax is too
weak?
Even the ability to declare blocks would be nicer than
long lines (and line split markers):-
I'd rather see us progress go a constraint and data driven
templating system. I'll discuss it more with you when we
meet up. The DSLs are just sentence templates and we
needmore than that.
So what? Leave the current DSL with all its deficiencies and
bugs?
DSLs are just template fragments, with any luck we can figure out
how they can fit into the larger picture of a more constrained and
validated approach.
We haven't planned anything yet, so really don't know. I just know
that pure fragment templates, with no constraints no data driven
suggestions, no validation is not an ideal long term approach.
Also being OSS nothing ever dies as long as someone is out there
using stuff and producing patches for it.
Mark
-W
Mark
then
[Book the customer for the flight]
{
$f.setAvailable( $f.getAvailable() - 1 );
update( $f );
Booking booking = new Booking();
booking.setCustomer( $r.getCustomer() );
booking.setFlight( $f );
insert( booking );
}
Currently each entry
must be a single line of text. This results in
long lines, especially on the RHS.
I have experimentally inserted a transformation of
the DSL text (in DSLTokenizedMappingFile)
which converts '\'+EOL on the fly to a space. (The
passed-in reader is read into a buffer, '\'+EOL
is translated to space, and EOLs are inserted
later to readjust the line number.) In a text
editor,
I can now write, e.g.,
then][][Bb]ook the customer for the flight=\
$f.setAvailable( $f.getAvailable() - 1 );\
update( $f ); \
Booking booking = new Booking(); \
booking.setCustomer( $r.getCustomer() ); \
booking.setFlight( $f ); \
insert( booking );
Of course, the DSL editor will not preserve this,
but future development might provide more
convenient editing there, too.