[Seaside] sending messages in lists

[Avi Bryant]

On Mon, 3 Jun 2002, Tim Rowledge wrote:

> I some sense I'd love to see it ending up as pretty much pure Smalltalk,
> but I know that not everybody is as single (simple?) minded as I am.

More that a lot of people have a need/desire to specify the layout as
HTML.  For those of you that don't, it shouldn't be that hard to put
together an all-smalltalk template builder instead.

> That could be interesting in various ways, not least that it would be a
> perfecly ordinary closure that would be amenable to dynamic translation
> and going jolly fast.

Yup.  Could get all kinds of good partial evaluation effects, too, in the
process of boiling everything down to stream operations.

> The bit that bothers me about bindings etc is the sort-of hidden magic
> about them; they're off to the side in a way.

Well, off-to-the-side is precisely the point.  The whole crux is that the
layout (and thus, in terms of loops at least, the control flow structure)
is specified in one place, and the logic is specified somewhere else.
Merging logic from one place with structure from another is a messy
operation.  In particular, what makes it messy is local variables: unless
you're literally merging source code, or doing "thisContext sender"
hacks, how do you share lexical scope?

Now, if you have no interest in keeping those two things separate, life is
a whole lot simpler.  But I'm not personally willing to give up on the
idea of templating yet.