The original string interpolation was based on hil which didn't allow
proper escaping, since they used a different escape pattern. Secondly,
the golang Unquote function didn't deal with the variable substitution,
which meant it had to be performed in a second step.
Most importantly, because we did this partial job in Unquote (the fact
that is strips the leading and trailing quotes tricked me into thinking
I was done with interpolation!) it was impossible to remedy the
remaining parts in a second pass with hil. Both operations needs to be
done in a single step. This is logical when you aren't tunnel visioned.
This patch replaces both of these so that string interpolation works
properly. This removes the ability to allow inline function calls in a
string, however this was an incidental feature, and it's not clear that
having it is a good idea. It also requires you wrap the var name with
curly braces. (They are not optional.)
This comes with a load of tests, but I think I got some of it wrong,
since I'm quite new at ragel. If you find something, please say so =D In
any case, this is much better than the original hil implementation, and
easy for a new contributor to patch to make the necessary fixes.
Since we focus on safety, it would be nice to reduce the chance of any
runtime errors if we made a typo for a resource parameter. With this
patch, each resource can export constants into the global namespace so
that typos would cause a compile error.
Of course in the future if we had a more advanced type system, then we
could support precise types for each individual resource param, but in
an attempt to keep things simple, we'll leave that for another day. It
would add complexity too if we ever wanted to store a parameter
externally.
Lastly, we might consider adding "special case" parsing so that directly
specified fields would parse intelligently. For example, we could allow:
file "/tmp/hello" {
state => exists, # magic sugar!
}
This isn't supported for now, but if it works after all the other parser
changes have been made, it might be something to consider.
