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Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project <[log in to unmask]>
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Wed, 25 Nov 2009 00:16:27 +0100
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Lars Hellström <[log in to unmask]>
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Frank Mittelbach skrev:
> I thought a bit more about the arguments brought forward by Lars about
> supporting a kind of dictionary to pass arguments to instances.
> 
> With more complex object types I clearly can see the advantages of this
> method, with more simpler types I'm not so sure though, partly because of the
> overhead in processing. That makes me leaning towards a dual approach (also
> suggested by Lars at one point if I remember correctly), ie have the most
> important arguments mandatory but allow for an additional dictionary to be
> passed along and queried as needed.

Yes, that's the usual approach, in my non-TeX experience: use 
positional arguments (which in (La)TeX translates to mandatory 
arguments) for things that anyway have to be specified in (almost) 
every call, but use named arguments ("options" with values) for things 
that wouldn't be specified in a typical call. Then the general 
syntactic capabilities of (La)TeX suggest that the best way to handle 
the latter type of argument is to wrap all of them (for a specific 
"command") up as a dictionary.

> Thinking along those lines brings up a couple of questions:
> 
> 
> What is the signature of an object type?
> ========================================
> 
[snip]
> 
> Coming back to the question: which if the following should be the defined
> behavior?
> 
> a) the object type defines the semantic of an object (of that type) including
>    the semantics of its mandatory arguments. The optional dictionary is not
>    considered and can be used in different ways by objects belonging to the
>    same object type.
> 
> b) the dictionary is part of the definition of an object type, ie the keys it
>    can contain and their semantics are defined by it, i.e., two objects only
>    belong to the same object type if their semantics are the same on all levels
> 
> c) kind of in between: the object type can define the semantics of certain keys
>    in which case all objects of this type have to support exactly that
>    interpretation, however an object is free to accept/interpret additional
>    keys.

I'd prefer (c), but I'd also like to remark that you seem to presume a 
rather rigid view of compatibility here; in RFC-speak, I get the 
impression that you're thinking in terms of MUST and SHALL, even though 
much of the material covered would perhaps be better suited by SHOULD 
or MAY.

Some general principles:

1. It's a good thing if the standard heading object type declaration 
comes with with a comprehensive list of "standard" key names for 
template authors to make use of when appropriate, but it's no disaster 
if something rather common should happen to be missing from this list; 
later releases can always make amendments.

2. If the value associated with a key is not simply supposed to be of 
type "some piece of text"[*], then it MUST be specified what the type 
of that data is. E.g., if the "author" key is generally an 
\and-separated list of author names, then whatever authority is 
specifying the "author" key MUST be clear about this. For a key as 
basic as "author", that authority would probably be (the documentation 
for) the xpackage defining the "heading" object type, but for other 
keys it could be (the documentation of) the template that makes use of 
this key, or (ditto) the package/class defining the user level commands 
that includes it in the dictionary.

[*] I find it an interesting question whether the basic "some piece of 
text" should allow \par tokens or not---not because of requiring macros 
to be \long, but because I suspect many objects will want to control 
the paragraph structure. But maybe objects that need to keep text in 
restricted horizontal mode should rather use some general mechanism to 
turn \par (and friends) off?

3. One shouldn't specify something if one doesn't have a good 
understanding of what that specification should say. It's much easier 
to add a specification for a key at version .2 or .3 than to admit at 
version .3 that "the spec we've had for this since version .0 is 
basically useless, so from now on we'll do it like this instead".


> How should the dictionary be specified?
> =======================================
> 
> Basically I see two ways:
> 
> a) passing the dictionary in a mandatory argument, e.g., the first or the last
> one, for example like
> 
>   \foo {...} {...}
>        {
>         \ToDictionary{key1}{val1}
>         \ToDictionary{key2}{val2}
>         ...
>         \ToDictionary{keyn}{valn}
>        }

I think this is the way to go. For objects, I furthermore think it 
should typically be the last argument, since this makes it easier to 
visually connect the other arguments with the underlying command, i.e., 
it improves code readability.

> b) setting up the dictionary prior to calling the instance, e.g.
> 
>   \ToDictionary{key1}{val1}
>   \ToDictionary{key2}{val2}
>   ...
>   \ToDictionary{keyn}{valn}
>   \foo {...} {...}

This opens up the gate to side-effect hell, IMO. Keeping this kind of 
mechanism as "purely functional" as possible should be a goal, because 
it tends to work better in the end.

> I wouldn't want to directly use property lists from the expl3 language at that
> point for two reasons:
> 
>  - on the level the instances are used (ie the designer level and above I
>    don't like to mix in expl3 syntax
> 
>  - setting up a property list using expl is fairly inefficient as the commands
>    need to deal with updating keys if the already exist and that takes a lot
>    of unnecessary time as we are starting from scratch here

OK.

Re: efficiency: My experience is that one can have TeX do quite 
extensive processing without slowing things down much *provided one 
does it in the mouth*. (I don't understand quite why that would be, but 
did some timing to confirm it in particular cases for fontinst v1.913.) 
A set of workable semantics for a fully expandable
   \DictionaryGet{<key>}{<dictionary>}{<default>}
command would be:

1.  \DictionaryGet{#1}{\ToDictionary{#2}{#3}}{#4}
   fully expands to the full expansion of #3 if the full
   expansion of #1 is equal to the full expansion of #2,
   and to the full expansion of #4 otherwise; probably
   equivalent to
     \str_if_eq:xxTF{#1}{#2}{#3}{#4}
   (or would that be \str_if_eq:nnTF?).

2.  \DictionaryGet{#1}{\ToDictionary{#2}{#3}#4}{#5}
   is after full expansion equivalent to
     \DictionaryGet{#1}{\ToDictionary{#2}{#3}}{
       \DictionaryGet{#1}{#4}{#5}
     }

3.  \DictionaryGet{#1}{}{#2}
   is after full expansion equivalent to #2.

The trickiest thing to do in TeX3 is the test for key equality, and I 
believe there has been discussions about newer engines having 
primitives that simplify this. (Not having to go via 
\expandafter\string\csname<key-name>\endcsname to sanitize key names is 
a good first step, although not essential.)


> last question for now (as this email is already too long):
> 
> 
> Should there be some inheritance of dictionaries?
> =================================================
> 
> If the dictionary is not fully tied to the object type (ie case a) or c) in
> the first question) we have two different possibilities to specify the
> dictionary behavior:

I think dictionary processing should be a generic functionality, rather 
than tied in with instance invokation.

As for inheritance, the dictionary semantics sketched above make it 
trivial to override or provide defaults for keys in a parent 
dictionary: just prepend or append respectively the necessary 
\ToDictionary items to the base dictionary.

Lars Hellström

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