[stringtemplate-interest] Limited control flow with stringtemplate - by design?

[Sohail Somani]

On Tue, 2005-15-11 at 07:17 +0100, Laurent Vaucher wrote:
> >
> > <if(number==SOMETHING)>blah<else>etc<endif>
> >
> > Is this possible? I'd rather use integral constants/enumerations  
> > rather
> > than booleans...
> 
>    This is BAD!!! Oh, I'm not taking a religious or philosophical  
> position, just repeating what I have read from the 'academic'   
> article about StringTemplate (http://www.cs.usfca.edu/~parrt/papers/ 
> mvc.templates.pdf). One of the goals of the library is to enforce  
> strict model-view separation by voluntarily making the template  
> language non-Turing-complete. You're not supposed to compute things  
> that the model part did not make explicitly available to the view  
> part. You might like it or not, but that's the way of StringTemplate.
> 
>    Being a (not yet completely desintoxicated) JSP addict and using a  
> lot of Java inside pages, I can understand the initial frustration.

Well that explains it. But I don't know if that makes things practical.
For example, you might have a template for type:

t = template("type");
t.setAttribute("name","double");

Now if you are translating into more than one language, where a double
can be Double, d0Ubl3 or double, it makes things very difficult.

Although I suppose this could be replaced by
t.setAttribute("name",template("double"));

:)

Sohail