Re: [Cfengine-develop] Re: Homework

[Andrew Stribblehill]

Quoting Andrews, Martin <address@hidden> (2003-03-04 04:34:29 GMT):
> It is all academic since I am generating my cfengine files now, but I found
> the perlisms noisy. Maybe since our audience is sysadmins and they are
> mostly fluent in perl it is okay, but it is adding a lot of punctuation.
> Maybe because of my recent efforts with pythin I was thinking that you would
> define a list with something like:
> 
> control:
>   myvals = [ a, b, c ]
> 
> And still reference it as plain
> 
> shellcommands:
>   "echo $(myvals)"

I like this too. By extension, associative arrays could be,

control:
  case_colour = { "linux" => "grey",  "sgi" => "purple" }

Then something to say that the former was to be treated as a class.

That said, I'm not sure we actually need associative arrays (or dicts
or hashes, whatever you call them) in Cfengine, since for my example,
the following already works:

control:
  linux::
    case_colour = ( grey )
  sgi::
    case_colour = ( purple )

But that's quite a bit more wordy than the former example. How about
this:

control:
  case_colour = Case(linux:: "grey", sgi:: "purple", any:: "invisible")

Now I see I shouldn't have chosen the example of the colour of a case
to showcase a 'case' statement :)

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