Evan Gibson wrote:
On Wed, Nov 10, 1999 at 07:43:44PM -0500, Christopher Petrilli wrote:
On 11/10/99 7:11 PM, Stuart 'Zen' Bishop at zen@cs.rmit.edu.au wrote:
I'm with you 100%. It makes me feel like I'm programming a reverse polish calculator sometimes :-)
It is sub-optimal, but it is not a programming language, so please don't try and hold it to those standards. DTML is a reporting language, and trying to make it do things it isn't designed to is simply going to further complicate the matter. Things like 'dtml-let' are dangerous in this reguard... they make you think you actually have a language worth doing anything beyond reporting in.
We've been talking about this around work and have pretty much agreed that DTML lets you do too much... It _lets_ you use it as a programming language, when what we should really be doing is restricting dtml to reporting stuff, make Python methods an intrinsic part of Zope and _require_ people to use python to do the really nasty stuff.
Ah, I said almost exactly the same in another post I just sent. :) Using Python or something else non-DTML should be obvious and natural and easy, whenever you reach the limits of DTML. And it should be easy to know that you have reached those limits.
DTML is _perfect_ as a reporting language and should always provide the front end to objects, but the objects themselves should be either database queries or python code.
Agreed.
Initially we did things in DTML because it was easier than writing external methods, but if you can write python methods inside Zope and cut out a lot of the dangerous namespace games in DTML (like _, dtml-let, REQUEST.set) then you _force_ the divorce between functionality and display, get DTML looking elegant again [snip]
Yes.. Though it probably takes a bit of thought figuring out how to make this natural and easy. Hm. Throwing out the _ namespace for instance might induce people to do something else that's horrible instead, if care isn't taken. [snip discussion on how to adapt DTML, and other discussions about ZSQL methods] Regards, Martijn