Musings of a Programmer

Update As Jeffrey points out in the comments, there's a much cleaner way of implementing this functionality (without extensions). I'm still interested in ways to manipulate Blade for producing 'DSLs', however.

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In order to break looped output into sections, you may write something like the following in Laravel's Blade templating language:

This works, but it's pretty ugly. There's a pretty significant mental-processing step going on as you skim through it, which isn't great.

Blade allows us to register custom "extensions" to the compiler. Using these, we can produce a much more declarative syntax, which reads a lot like something you'd see in a Ruby library:

Personally I feel the readability of this is a huge bonus, as we're hiding the implementation details.

This syntax was implemented using the following extensions: