From: Tom Sawyer <transami@...>
Date: 2003-02-07T03:37:42+09:00
Subject: Re: %L, %l revisited

On Thursday 06 February 2003 11:10 am, Tom Sawyer wrote:
> [ruby-talk:50473]. In his idea, if you assign a character (except
> quotes) after the here-document indicator "<<-", All blanks and
> assigned character at the head of each line will be deleted.
> Here is a example assigning '|':
>
>     p <<-|EOS
>
>       |  foo
>       |    bar
>
>     EOS
>     # => "  foo\n    bar\n".

> a number of suggestions were made at this point (many incompatible with
> current here docs). the most important point though was probably that the
> deliminator should be redefinable. but no specific solution was derived for
> this.

my mistake, assigning character was built in. i think this was generally over 
looked. great! i think that gives us this:

A NEW HERE DOCUMENT FORM PROVIDING MARGIN CONTROL:

	p <<-:EOS
			:#{foo}
			:example
		EOS

all here variants work, ex-

	p <<)'EOS'
		)foo
		)example
	EOS

ADDITIONALLY A NEW COMPLIMENTRY DELIMITED INPUT:

	p %L|#{foo}
	         |example

and provides likewise for the variances, ex-

	p %l)foo
	       )example

potential additional suggestions:

the construct can be termintated with the deliminator to be able to apply 
methods to it:

	p %l)foo
	       )example).upcase

further the %L, %l delimited input can be terminated per-line and have 
per-line aggregating method calls:

	p %L|#{foo}| << ' bar'
		|example|.upcase

if possible, there could be two forms of this. perhaps %A, %a for the above 
and instead use %L, %l for a non-aggregating form. to show the difference:

	p %a|foo|.upcase
                |BAR|.downcase

	foo bar

	p %l|foo|.upcase
               |BAR|.downcase

	FOO bar

but i don't know if these expansions of the main idea are actually possible.

-- 
tom sawyer, aka transami
transami@transami.net