[ZPT] Confused about Zope

[Chris Withers]

Evan Simpson wrote:
> 
>> The idea I was going on, though, is to *avoid* breaking from TAL--I 
>> wanted people to learn TAL then reuse those skills for non-XML.
> 
> I suggest that TAL (as opposed to TALES) is so *small* that there is 
> very little knowledge there worth transferring to another domain.

I beg to differ. Especially when they have to learn an alternative to TAL for a 
specific need that ends up being a whole new language like PTL.

> A great deal of the unpleasantness 
> of templated SQL has to do with things like lists that don't tolerate 
> trailing commas (despite mandatory surrounding parens), separate but 
> coordinated lists of names and values (INSERT), and keywords such as 
> 'where' that should only appear if their "section" is non-empty.

I hypothesise that these can all eb taken care of with the Zope 3 API stuff as 
well. What's the best way to test that hypothesis?

> I start thinking along these lines:
> 
> s = Delete("addresses")
> s.where = w = Where()
> if state:
>     w.add(Field("state"), "=", Value(state))
> if zip:
>     w.add(Field("postcode"), "=", Value(zip))
> if w:
>     w.add(Or(Not(Field("current")),
>              (Field("status"), "containing", Value("x")))
> 
> ...but I quickly get discouraged by the verbosity and complexity that 
> seems to be required to do it correctly.

Indeed, Yuk II ;-)

chairs,

Chris