At 10:41 AM 10/10/02, Neil Schemenauer wrote:
>On Thu, Oct 10, 2002 at 09:27:20AM -0400, Joel Shprentz wrote:
> > I hope that plain and html are class names, not keywords.
>
>In the current implementation those names are part of the syntax not
>identifiers.
>
> > Then we would not be limited to three types of functions.  For
> > example, one could imagine an sql class that converts strings to the
> > appropriate form for SQL queries.
> >
> >     def bar [sql] (lastName):
> >         "SELECT * FROM staff\n"
> >         "WHERE last = "
> >         lastName
>
>How imaginary is this use case?  Would you or anyone you know use it?  I
>would think it would be much better to use '?' parameters.  Eg.
>
>          cursor.execute("SELECT * FROM staff "
>                         "WHERE last = ?", lastName)

For me, this use case is totally imaginary.  I will not use it.

When using the Python DB API, your approach is great for canned queries.  I
think the template based approach could be useful for more complex,
dynamically built queries.

For example, when I was shopping online for a new clothes dryer, I had to
answer questions like preferred brand, gas or electric, and maximum
price.  This template could construct the query from those answers:

     def searchDryers (brand, power, maxPrice):
         "SELECT * FROM product WHERE type = 'dryer'"
         if brand:
             " AND brand = "
             brand
         if power:
             " AND power = "
             power
         if maxPrice:
             " AND price <= "
             maxPrice

I introduced the sql example to suggest that your proposed improvement to
PTL has applicability beyond HTML.  Others have mentioned XML.  We still
use SGML.  The quoting rules vary somewhat.


--
Joel Shprentz              (703) 478-9668
1516 Park Glen Court       jshprentz@his.com
Reston, VA 20190