[stringtemplate-interest] ST 3.1 release imminent

[Terence Parr]

On Nov 14, 2007, at 9:12 PM, John Snyders wrote:

> I'm glad to hear that 3.1 is nearly ready. I hope it is not too  
> late to bring up these issues. Sorry I have been busy with other  
> things and have not been following the ST list.
>
> The most important bug that needs to be fixed in my opinion is  
> passing iterators to templates. I did a quick scan of the bug list  
> both open and recently resolved and didn't find a mention of this.  
> Passing an iterator to a template just won't work.

Correct.  I see no way around this as they violate ST's requirement  
of no side effects.

> Something like Java 5 Iterable must be passed instead. I wrote  
> about this here:
> http://www.antlr.org:8080/pipermail/stringtemplate-interest/2007- 
> May/001073.html
> http://www.antlr.org:8080/pipermail/stringtemplate-interest/2007- 
> May/001074.html
> The problem of "using a list up" is also mentioned here
> http://www.antlr.org:8080/pipermail/stringtemplate-interest/2007- 
> January/000915.html

Do you have a solution?  I'm all ears :)

> It is a coincident that just this weekend  I was trying to use ST  
> on a quick  project to create some address labels from a CSV file.  
> I was going to turn the CSV file into JSON  (using python) and use  
> STST from the command line. The trouble is that the address label  
> document (OOo XML) was a table and the first column needed to be  
> different than the first. This meant using the first and rest  
> functions on a list that was passed as a parameter to a template.  
> The above bug made it impossible to do what I wanted. Sadly I had  
> to fall back on XML and XSLT.

I'm eager to fix this.  Perhaps we simply copy the data?  Expensive.

> Even if this can't be fixed now I think it should go in the bug  
> database. Not sure if I have access to enter bugs or not.

I have a unit test that fails...i'll add

http://www.antlr.org:8888/browse/ST-30

> I also think that there should be a bug report to Remove definition  
> of INT from the grammar.

http://www.antlr.org:8888/browse/ST-31

which grammar is it?

> Any interest in including STST in the distribution?

sure.

> I'll mention some other feature requests just in case they were  
> forgotten. I know that 3.1 is just a point release.
>
> Support programming in the large by allowing .stg and .st files to  
> refer to other .stg and .st files.
>
> List comprehensions?
> http://www.antlr.org:8080/pipermail/stringtemplate-interest/2007- 
> June/001116.html
>
> List slice?
> http://www.antlr.org:8080/pipermail/stringtemplate-interest/2007- 
> June/001090.html

I'd rather not add this w/o more thought.

> Support for really large input data?
> http://www.antlr.org:8080/pipermail/stringtemplate-interest/2006- 
> December/000891.html

existing bug report about this...

>> o added elseif. $if(x)$...$elseif(y)$...$else$...$endif$
>>
> I really like this

hooray!

>> o updated some unit tests (names, guts) to make more sense.
>>
>> o updated group.g and eval.g so that list literals can have empty
>>    atoms like $["a",,"b"]:{n | ...}; null="nullstring"$.
>>
> Why this syntax rather than having a literal representation for  
> null. Like
>
> $["a",null,"b"]:{n | ...}; null="nullstring"$
>
> A literal null may find other uses since it can be passed as the  
> argument to a template.

Yeah, I thought about that...wasn't sure that adding a keyword was  
worth it.  Passing null to template for attribute x is achieved by  
not setting a value for x at the moment. ;)  Hmm...another case?

THanks for your excellent analysis and time invested in ST, John!

Ter