[stringtemplate-interest] Output formatting issue

[Tom Bentley]

> The problem is the "40".  What if you need to do truncate but not in  
> the middle of an HTML tag?  I have been thinking about size of  strings 
> as you have seen on the list.  I wonder if a truncate  operator would be 
> useful in general.  I can easily make a renderer  that truncates, but 
> there is no way to pass it an argument...that is  specifically 
> disallowed in general as it would be too much like code,  but perhaps a 
> special operator would satisfy everybody :)

Is having a 40 somewhere in the template really /that much/ like code? 
Perhaps only if that 40 can be the result of some other template, rather 
than being a literal, or being bound outside the template (i.e. before 
the template is evaluated).

OTOH, it seems a slightly arbirary restriction to insist that renderer 
parameters be literals (or constants?).

Tom