I say this without authority on the subject, but I'm guessing that the parenthesis are used to help parse the strings. As you may or may not have noticed in the user's guide<http://velocity.apache.org/engine/devel/user-guide.html#VTL:_Formatting_Issues>, Velocity is white-space agnostic. Thus, if the grammar allowed for your usage pattern, a certain style would have to be set for us, otherwise it wouldn't be known where the directive ends.
With regards to the curly braces, I will also point you to the user's guide<http://velocity.apache.org/engine/devel/user-guide.html#formalreferencenotation> section on formal reference notation. I found few cases where we needed to use formal reference notation in any of our templates, but there are times when it is worth knowing. On Mon, Mar 26, 2012 at 3:36 AM, Nikhil G. Daddikar <n...@celoxis.com> wrote: > Hello, > > I was looking at Velocity syntax and have a few questions. > > What is use of parenthesis in the #set directive: #set ($x = 1) Why not > simply: #set $x = 1 ? > > Another question is regarding curly braces: What is the use of curly > braces in the directives? E.g. #{set} ($x = 1) > > I am sure there are good reasons, just would like to know why. > > Thanks. > > > > ------------------------------**------------------------------**--------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: > user-unsubscribe@velocity.**apache.org<user-unsubscr...@velocity.apache.org> > For additional commands, e-mail: user-h...@velocity.apache.org > >
