How to modify the scope chain without `with` ?

[Garrett Smith]

On Mon, Feb 15, 2016 at 1:13 AM, Coroutines <coroutines at gmail.com> wrote:

> This post might be overly wordy.  Sorry.  It relates to the
> functionality provided by the `with` keyword and why I think it's
> important in the future.
>
> I am currently rewriting a templating module that I think is very
> useful for it's ability to turn a function in coffeescript syntax into
> a sort of DSL - something that looks like this:
>
> template = ->
>   doctype 5
>   html ->
>     head ->
>       title @title
>     body ->
>       div id: 'content', ->
>         if @posts?
>           for p in @posts
>             div class: 'post', ->
>               p p.name
>               div p.comment
>       form method: 'post', ->
>         ul ->
>           li -> input name: 'name'
>           li -> textarea name: 'comment'
>           li -> input type: 'submit'
>
> For those not familiar with Coffeescript, "= ->" creates a function
> with no arguments, the indented sub-block is the body of the function.
>
> All of these things essentially compile into nested functions like:
> html(head(title(this.title))
>
> (not an exact translation)
>
> Anyway, this library/module called (ck) exploits the little-used
> `with` keyword.  It creates a function like this:
>
> function (scope, template) { with (scope) { template(); } }
>
> So the template is just a series of functions that lookup within
> `scope` for a function creating HTML.  The problem is this module
> (imo) wastefully creates a lot of closures to create the HTML tags.
>

I think you'll have a lot better luck starting out like I did: Learn
HTML first. You're working on some complicated stuff there, and for
me, I always try to get simple to work. Simple and working is good!

You cannot have too solid of a grasp of HTML. Ditto for CSS.

When it comes to javascript, context and scope can be tricky and
confusing for those coming from other languages.

Thank you,
-- 
Garrett
@xkit
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