[web-devel] Hamlet syntax suggestion

[Neil Mitchell]

Hi,

I am thinking of doing a project using Hamlet (and perhaps a little of
Yesod, I'm not quite sure). As I was reading through the book
(excellent resource!) I was surprised by the syntax for $maybe, in
particular that you get case matching on only the Maybe type. Being
used to Haskell I'm a fan of general solutions, so I commented on the
book (http://www.yesodweb.com/book/templates#c5). Since book comments
aren't really the right place to discuss something technical I thought
I'd move it here.

Currently Hamlet has:

$if a; $elseif b; $else

$maybe x <- ma; $nothing

I think if $if was expanded to be pattern guards, rather than boolean
expressions, it would be more powerful, yet remain just as easy to
use. So, I'd like:

$if Just x <- ma

To be equivalent to:

$maybe x <- ma

Then $else and $nothing also become equivalent.

If you also allow commas you can write things like:

$if Just x <- age, x > 18
   adults
$else
   kids

These have a very simple explanation - they're just pattern guards.
Michael wants Hamlet to remain simple, in order to allow designers to
use it without knowing programming. I think that's a reasonable goal,
but I don't think a richer syntax for $if would make it any harder in
the common case. I also think that if inexperienced people have to do
more advanced tricks - i.e. converting their ADT into nested Maybe
values in order to do some case analysis, it's going to end up harder
in the long run.

I had two other, smaller thoughts, while reading the book:

1) $for x <- xs, x > 12 could be used to generalise $for to list
comps. However, I notice you've got $for working over anything
Foldable, rather than just lists, so it's not necessarily such a clear
conversion. It's probably also less useful - since filter isn't too
bad - and you can always do $for x <- [x | x <- xs, x > 12]

2) CoffeeScript makes Javascript much more useful. It would be very
cool if as well as Julius there was something more like CoffeeScript,
or perhaps exactly CoffeeScript. I also idly wondered if you could
translate Haskell syntax to Javascript (without the types), but
perhaps that isn't such a great idea.

Thanks, Neil