[Boulder.pm] Trickey (for a newbie) String Replacement

[Peter Hutnick]

Rob Nagler wrote:

> Peter Hutnick writes:
> 
>>I'm not following you here.  I've used getopts that way.  Maybe I just 
>>don't know the "bad" way?
> 
> 
> If you say:
> 
>     use Foo::Bar;

Oh.  I lied.  But it's fixed now ;-)

> You allow Foo::Bar to pollute your name space with whatever it likes
> for all time.  You relinquish control of your naming.  That's why
> @EXPORT_OK is not ok imho.  I can see people wanting to bring in names
> with:
> 
>     use Foo::Bar qw(foo bar);
> 
> That's a laziness thing, and in certain cases it makes sense.

What's the non-lazy way to use the functions in a package?

Any idea how to fix the opposite problem of typo warnings when you 
"reach down into" the module?  (E.g. $Getopt::Std::opt_h)

> If $anything contains something that isn't defined and then all of a
> sudden it becomes defined, well, there you go, you've got new
> semantics and you have to figure out which of your 100 rules is
> causing them.

>>You might consider revising "subject matter oriented program evolves" in 
>>the first paragraph to "subject matter oriented program (SMOP) evolves."
> 
> 
> Done.

Cool!

>>The rules are going to end up in a separate file that lives with the 
>>LaTeX file it works with.
> 
> 
> Cool.  Could you not create a latex style sheet that would do the work
> of converting your latex to html?

Yes, I could not.  I actually don't know the first thing about LaTeX 
style sheets.  Do they really generate non TeX text output?!

>>As I said before, generality seems unachievable for this
>>application.
> 
> 
> Never.  ;-)  Check out doclifter.  It is simply amazing.  However,
> your customer (even that person is yourself) probably doesn't want to
> pay for any more generalization than is absolutely necessary.

I don't think I was clear.  The two do not share a 1:1 correspondence. 
Any mapping that I devise could fail with a different input.

The biggest killer is the fact that TeX lets you make new commands. 
Guaranteed failure right there.

So I have settled on a sort of meta-language for describing how /my/ 
document is best represented in HTML, and s script to implement those rules.

A significant portion will be relevant to some other arbitrary LaTeX 
file, so a few simple changes to the rules file will allow applicability 
to any other file.

-Peter

PS: I am really enjoying and learning from this discussion.