Scott, At the risk of sounding pedantic (rats, too late):
If the point hasn't been already been made, I can't think of a language that allows digits as the first character of an identifier. Lexical units starting with digits are assumed to be numbers. '4NAME' might seem harmless, but against conventions like '4L' ( long suffix, and several other similar ones in the 'C' world), it's gets confusing in a hurry. > Scott Palmer wrote: > > Hello all, > > > > I have an existing project that already has a simple template engine > > that I would like to replace with Velocity. As much as possible I would > > like to support the existing format of the template files that I already > > have. > > > > My existing files have numbered properties that I access by placing a > > dot '.' followed by an integer after the property name. E.g. > > CLIENTS.0 would refer to the first client, CLIENTS.COUNT would refer to > > the number of clients. CLIENTS.0.NAME would refer to the name of the > > first client, etc. > > > > I'm wondering if there is any hope of keeping that format when moving to > > Velocity. That is, I wonder if the changes required to velocity to > > support a leading digit in a (sub)property name would be small enough > > that I would have any hope of making such a change on my own having > > never seen the Velocity code and not wanting to spend much time tweaking > > it. I was thinking that I could use the existing support for looking up > > values in a Map object with some small modification that would result in > > the ability to allow numeric strings (e.g. "0") to be used as a key for > > the lookup. > > > > I have a backup plan to change the syntax to something like CLIENTS(0) > > if I have to, but that would mean that my customers would have to make > > much more significant changes to their existing templates. > > > > Should I attempt to tweak Velocity into accepting my existing syntax, or > > is it simply going to be too much work? (It wont take much to make it > > "too much".) > > > > Thanks, > > > > Scott > > > > > > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- - michael dykman - [EMAIL PROTECTED] --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
