OpenEuphoria

Re: Kanarie Template System

• Posted by "Juergen Luethje" <j.lue at gmx.de> Aug 21, 2004
• 516 views

Tommy Carlier wrote:

> Juergen Luethje wrote:

<snip>

>> How about an upper() and a lower() function built into Kanarie?

<snip>

>> That is, if the field name is completely in lower/upper case, the output
>> for that field also will be in lower/upper case.
>> If the field name is *not completely* in lower or upper case, the case
>> of the value of that field will not be changed.
>
> I wouldn't take it that far: it would limit the possibilities and add
> little value.

After having thought more about it, I do agree. Mostly, I would not need
such a functionality myself, and it would force the user, to follow a
rather unusual convention for creating field names.

However, sooner or later I probably *will* need such a functionality.
I admit, that my example with the {ANIMAL} field was not very convincing.

When I'll have the time, I'll write a citation manager such as "Endnote"
in Euphoria. Such a program helps authors of scientific papers
tremendously in automatically and correctly formatting a list of cited
works. Authors can use the program to maintain a reference database, and
by selecting the appropriate Kanarie template, they can choose a
bibliographic style according to the journal for which the paper is
written.

Then it sometimes will be necessary, that the Kanarie template is able
to determine, that e.g. the family name of an author will be cited in
upper case. But this is possible with Kanarie anyway. In my Euphoria
program, I simply can maintain two versions of the family names, one
version "as is", and the other version in upper case. The template then
determines, which version will be used:


-----------[ demo.ex ]-----------
include kanarie.e
sequence fName, template
integer data

data = createData()
fName = "Smith"
setValue(data, "family_name", fName)
setValue(data, "FAMILY_NAME", upper(fName))
template = loadTemplate("demo.knr")
puts(1, generate(data, template))
closeData(data)
-------------[ end ]-------------

-----------[ demo.knr ]----------
{family_name}
{FAMILY_NAME}
-------------[ end ]-------------


To make a long story short:
I want to thank you for the decision, to make the field names
case-sensitive. I see now, that this is more than just following coding
habits. Things like those mentioned above would also have been possible
with case-insensitive field names, if course. Then the template above
would have looked like this:

-----------[ demo.knr ]----------
{family_name_as_is}
{family_name_upper}
-------------[ end ]-------------


But case-sensitive field names allow choosing much nicer, and more
intuitive names, and, generally speaking, there are much more
possibilities for choosing a name, compared to case-insensitive names.

Regards,
   Juergen