String Interpolation Highlighting

[nathanrboyer]

My typical usage of println would look something like: println("These are the results: x = $x, y = $y").
I wonder if tprintln could automatically color interpolated values? I know I can write tprintln("These are the results: x =", x, "\b, y =", y) instead, but I find the former code easier to read.

I did see the portion of the documentation that would presumably cover this use case.

But, we are working on a highlight feature that will be able to parse strings and color their elements correctly. Like this:

import Term: tprint, highlight
tprint(highlight("This is a: 1 of type ::Int64 this is a function print"))

However, I would rather see highlight as a keyword option for tprint that defaults to true than its own function. This default highlighting would be lowest priority and overwritten by any other formatting called for inside tprint. That way if you don't want the element highlighting, you could just color it some other way (or take the t off tprint).

Finally, I would just like to commend the authors for writing some of the best documentation I have seen. Very enjoyable to read!

[FedeClaudi]

Thanks for reaching out and for the comment about the docs, I tried making them less tedious than usual documentation.

I agree, tprint should style the output for you, instead of having to do it manually or invoke highlight. The highlighting functionality is currently not great, but it's one of the things I want to improve when I get a chance. I will also add automatic styling to tprint, thanks for the suggestion!

[FedeClaudi]

An update, I've improved highlight and added it as the default behavior of tprint (for string only for now):

txt = """
These are numbers: 12311, 2 122.2321  121e-4 1.5e10

These are strings: "aaa" and 
            'dsda33d'

These are operators: + - * % ^ /

These are operators: [green]+[/green] - * % ^  /


This is code: `print(x)` and
    ```
        do α
        do β
    ```


This is an expression: :(x + y)
"""

print("\n\n")
tprint(txt)

This is not bad, but the problem is that user provided markup style is ignored at beast or broken in the worst case.
This is because given a string "[green]+[/green] highlight surrounds + with [red]+[/red] which being inside of green takes precedence. Preserving the user's markup's style might be very tricky since it could even be defined several lines before + appears...

For this reason it might be best to not have highlight work as the default - or perhaps only have it as default if no markup information is in the string to be printed.
What do you think?

Note: user's markup information will work fine for portions of text that don't get highlighted, it will only be lost for highlighted stuff.

[nathanrboyer]

... or perhaps only have it as default if no markup information is in the string to be printed.

This would be my preference. Then I think you wouldn't have to use the highlight keyword argument in most cases. tprint("x = $x") would have nice defaults, and tprint("{red}x = $x"{/red}") would respect the user formatting and just be red. Once you are customizing colors, you probably want to pick your own anyway.

[FedeClaudi]

This is indeed the behavior now:

using Term


x = 1
print("\n"^3)

print("print:  ")
println("x = $x")

print("tprint:  ")
tprint("x = $x")


print("\nwith style:  ")
tprint("{red}x{/red} = $x")

[nathanrboyer]

I am suggesting that highlighting be automatically turned off in the last case, only coloring the "x" since markup information is present in the string.
I would always want my markup information to take precedence e.g. this should just be green.

[FedeClaudi]

Regarding your original question:

This is an expression: :(x + y)
These are the results: x = 1, y = 2

results in =1 and =2 being highlighted - but it won't work if the interpolated variables are e.g. strings or symbols since once they're interpolated they just look like a normal part of the string.

If you want strings/symbols to work correctly you'll need to add : or ' in the string:

x, y = :z, "test"
tprint("These are the results: x = :$x, y = '$y'")

Or you can do:

tprint("These are the results: x = $(highlight(x)), y = $(highlight(y))")

which would work in most cases except for x,y being strings