String interpolation about squint

[lilactown]

Nitpicking: #i is a bit ambiguous, what about #str?

[borkdude]

Yes, #i isn't a good choice. Not sure about #str, maybe too general?. What about #<<? << was the string interpolation macro in clojure.contrib. Too cryptic?

#<< "hello ${name}"

[borkdude]

Or #$ "hello ${name}: too Perly...

[lilactown]

Outside of the reader tag we use, how ought we to handle custom tag functions? Something that would expand to

html`<div style="color: red;">hello ${user}!</div>`

[lilactown]

perhaps we could allow passing in a list, like #tmpl (html "<div style=\"color: red;\">hello ${user}!</div>")

[corasaurus-hex]

maybe #` ? Some way to indicate that these are backticks?

[corasaurus-hex]

oh dang that's not bad @lilactown, I like it

[corasaurus-hex]

how does that generalize to bare template strings, though?

[lilactown]

i'm a bit ignorant of how the reader works is but i think we could have it support both bare strings as well as lists with a tag function

#tmpl "Hello, ${user}!"

#tmpl (html "<div style=\"color: red;\">hello ${user}!</div>")

I'm using tmpl as a stand in for whatever we decide to use.

[lilactown]

Thinking out loud, I'm worried about how we'll handle complex cases than just interpolating a variable. For instance, how should we handle expressions?

#tmpl "Hello, ${(:name user)}!"

Perhaps we should lean into the tag accepting a collection, and instead of writing the ${} syntax directly we write lists

#tmpl ("Hello, " user-name "!")
#tmpl ("Hello, " (:name user) "!")
#tmpl (html "<div style=\"color: red;\">Hello, " user-name "!</div>")

[borkdude]

#tmpl ("Hello, " user-name "!")

Hmm, this isn't any better to me than just using str. The point of "${foo}" is that it's easier to write.

We could support #tmpl "Hello ${name}" and #tmpl [:html "<pre>${name}</pre>].

[lilactown]

@borkdude how should we handle arbitrary expressions inside of the template string, like I was talking about above?