I guess some people had problem reading my previous message.
Here it goes again on plain text.
Hi,
I started really experimenting with Velocity this weekend and got a bunch of
extrange
behavior, that I do not understand:
1) I could not use "-", "_", nor numbers in macro identifiers, got grammar
errors.
Things started to work when I remove them. However the tests suit and
the documentation,
and the grammar seem to say otherwise.
2) Given a macro, xyz, with no arguments, the documentation says invocation
is: #xyz()
however, that would put "()" as part of the output. I had to use #xyz
without parentesis.
So, is this some but somewhere? a non commited change to the grammar? Or
what.
Some other things I noticed was that when evaluating macros, the entire body
of the macro
gets reparsed everytime the macro is expanded. That seems like a very costly
operation
when one has lots of macros (in my case I have lots and they are heavily
called) I am
doig XML-XML translations with this.
I can see that such an approach is needed for interpolation (having snippets
of code
expanded in place on the macro) but for that small use it seems that the
price is
too big. An #eval($code) directive that specializes on this kind of thing
seems to me
to be more approrpiate. This can really speed things up, at least in my
case.
Am I misunderstanding how this stuff works?
Jose Alberto
