RE: Curl [was RE: Java]

["Christopher Barber" <address@hidden>]

> Quoth Chris Double on Tuesday, 11 December:
> : One thing I like about Curl
> : is the way it mixes text and the programming language itself. So
> : producing things where the textual content is the main focus with some
> : dynamic parts is very easy. Oh, and the chance to win $3,000 in
> : programming competitions ;-)
>
> Like JSP, PHP, eRuby, ePerl, etc.  It may be worthwhile to observe
> that a great deal of emphasis, in the web development literature, has
> been placed on separating content, design, and code into independently
> maintainable domains, so that teams can be lightly coupled across
> boundaries of differing expertise and/or authority.  Hence, for
> example, the Velocity template engine for Apache.
>
> I am largely ignorant of Curl, but to the best of my knowledge, it
> doesn't seem to fit this model -- which may be just great, in part
> because it integrates server- and client-side execution, and hence has
> a very different model than dynamic-content + DHTML -- a model in
> which different considerations may apply.  It would be interesting to
> hear the view from 10km on this subject, from Christopher Barber, as
> well as being quite apposite to issues of designing languages for
> specific application domains.

The manner in which you separate content from code is a design decision, and
there is no single correct answer as to how to do it.  Accordingly, the Curl
language does not force you to do it any particular way and provides a range
of techniques.  You can directly mix code and text if you want, but you can
also create packages of text formats, and other graphical presentation
objects that can be customized to present your document in different ways.
You can also use the built-in XML parser to read data in that format.  It's
up to you.

- Christopher