[Zope-dev] Re: TALES idea: tuple unpacking

[Shane Hathaway]

Tino Wildenhain wrote:
> Shane Hathaway wrote:
>> We've come up with a number of generally useful prefixes, BTW.  Off 
>> the top of my head:
>>
>> call:   -- Call a named method
>> int:    -- Look up an item by index
>> format: -- Perform simple formatting operations like "format:money"
>> zope:   -- Access a big Zope API
>>
>> It sure would be nice to have these prefixes, both in Zope 2 and Zope 3.
> 
> 
> Hm. But then would we not be better of using python: expressions in the 
> first place? Seems to save a lot of typing.

How is it less typing to write a Python expression?

> I'd better like to build up lazy complex objects with python scripts
> to pass to ZPT, I think this would make more sense.

Think of prefixes as site-wide, generally useful Python scripts.  Quite 
often some API returns something that's intuitively easy to present, but 
ZPT's syntax makes it somewhat difficult to present.  For example, it 
should not be necessary to write a Python script or expression every 
time you want to format the number 5 as "$5.00".

Shane