Proposal for new operators to python that add syntactic sugar for hierarcical data.

[bruno at modulix]

glomde wrote:
>>Adding ugly and unintuitive "operators" to try to turn a general purpose
>>programming language into a half-backed unusable HTML templating
>>language is of course *much* more pythonic...
> 
> 
> IT is not only for HTML. I do think html and xml are the biggest
> creators of
> hierarcical treestructures. 

What is a 'non-hierarchical treestructure' ? A list ?-)


> But it would work for any package that
> manipulates,
> creates hierarchical data. 

FWIW, filesystems are trees, most RDBMS use BTrees, and almost any OO
program is a graph of objects - trees being a subset of graphs..

Strange enough, working with trees is nothing new, and it seems that
almost anyone managed to get by without cryptic 'operators' stuff.

> I used HTML as example since it is a good
> example and
> most people would understand the intention.

Sorry for being dumb.

> But could you elaborate on your comment that it is unusable. 

Ask all the coders that switched from Perl to Python why they did so...

> Do you
> think all template systems are unusable

Nope - I use template systems everyday.

Please don't take it wrong: there's surely something to do to ease
declarative XML-like (including JSON, Yaml etc...) datastructure
construction. But I think the pythonic way to go would rely on
metaprogramming - not on ugly perlish syntax.

-- 
bruno desthuilliers
python -c "print '@'.join(['.'.join([w[::-1] for w in p.split('.')]) for
p in 'onurb at xiludom.gro'.split('@')])"