kee nethery wrote:
> I’m confused. Can someone explain why merge function exists when the
> put function works just as well?
>
> merge( [[ 1 + 2 ]] = 3)
> vs
> put 1 + 2 && “= 3”
>
> What is it that merge can do that a put cannot do? Just asking because
> I don’t want LiveCode to end up like Perl where there are so many
> completely different ways to do the exact same thing that one person’s
> perl code can be unreadable to another equally talented Perl coder.
Not to worry about new things in the language stinking up the place. <g>
Merge has been in the xTalk family of languages for a long time, and
serves a distinct purpose. A little history may be helpful:
Gary Poppitz of the SuperCard team introduced the merge function to the
xTalk world in the mid-90s, to support a server-side version of
SuperCard called Flamethrower.
The goal was to provide a convenient way to sprinkle xTalk evaluations
and statements throughout text that isn't xTalk -- in that use-case, HTML.
In short: templating.
Without a merge function you'd need to write your own parse to walk
through the text to find whatever delimiters you're using, then run the
found substring through "do" or "value". Possible, but tedious and
error-prone. Indeed there were some HyperCard stacks back in the day
with similar functionality done in script (Bob McBurney's Arachnid comes
to mind), so one could deliver dynamic web pages from a Mac server in
our favorite language. But it was no speed demon compared to what LC
does by handling that robustly in the engine.
Some time around MetaCard v2.0 Scott Raney added it to the engine we now
call LiveCode, so it's been around for more than 20 years. Mark
Waddingham has enhanced it since then, and the core functionality is
similar in many respects to how LC Server processes .lc files, so it's
not going away any time soon.
And considering its utility, I'm grateful for it. While I use it most
often with HTML templates, I've used it with other formats as well for a
wide range of tasks. The ability to quickly and conveniently process
any number of LC Script placeholders within a body of non-LC text has
many applications once you get the hang of it.
Bonus:
A sort of logical inverse to using LC expressions in the middle of
non-LC text is to put non-LC text in the middle of LC Scripts. In bash
this is done with heredoc, and some other languages offer such
functionality as well. I've proposed it in the LC request queue:
https://quality.livecode.com/show_bug.cgi?id=17471
Comment #5 there from Brian Milby shows existing syntax used in another
xTalk, SenseTalk, that could conceivably be adopted, perhaps less useful
for compatibility with that dialect than simply having proven design
work already done.
Used with the merge function, a heredoc-like implementation would make
short work of many tasks we currently write
"complicated"&space&"and"&space&"difficult-to-read"&space&"concatenation"
for.
--
Richard Gaskin
Fourth World Systems
Software Design and Development for the Desktop, Mobile, and the Web
____________________________________________________________________
ambassa...@fourthworld.com http://www.FourthWorld.com
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