| Xpand |
MERL |
| SomeFixedText |
'SomeFixedText' |
| «SOMECOMMAND» |
SOMECOMMAND |
|
In XPand commands are quoted,
whereas in MERL fixed text is quoted.
|
| «DEFINE foo ... ENDDEFINE» |
Report 'foo' ... EndReport |
In MERL, each report is defined on
its own, not with several reports one after another in a single
text.
Each report is defined on a particular Graph type (or the
supertype of all, Graph itself).
|
| «FILE Name + ".java" ... ENDFILE» |
filename :Name '.java' write ... close |
| «EXPAND foo FOREACH Bar» |
foreach .Bar { subreport 'foo' run } |
You don't need to define a
subreport, you can just put the commands from foo in the {}.
This often makes more sense, e.g. if you're not going to call
foo from elsewhere.
foreach is for navigation from a graph to its elements.
For navigation between elements use "do" or "dowhile" (which
covers SEPARATOR):
|
| «EXPAND foo FOREACH Bar» |
do .Bar { subreport 'foo' run } |
| «EXPAND foo FOREACH Bar SEPARATOR ","» |
dowhile .Bar { subreport 'foo' run ','} |
| «this.name» |
:name |
| «LET ... AS var ..<var>.. ENDLET» |
variable 'var' write ... close ..$var.. |
|
For assignments with a single
element on the right-hand side, you can use the shorter form: $var
= 'foo', $var = :foo etc.
|
| «REM...ENDREM» |
/*...*/ |
| «PROTECT ID ... ... ENDPROTECT» |
md5id ... md5block ... md5sum |
| «CSTART ... CEND ...» |
filename 'bar.java'
md5start ... md5stop ...
merge .. .. .. close |
|
The start and end sequences are
specified in the filename command, since they will be the same for
the whole file
|
| «this.name.toUpper()» |
:Name%upper |
|
For text manipulation, e.g. with
Java in oAW, you can use MERL
translators . Many are defined in _translators,
such as %upper a-z A-Z, and you can define your own to convert any
combination of characters, strings and regular expressions.
|
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