Inspired by the Ruby construct where you can embed something like

#{"<em>some string</em>" if <em>condition</em>}

inside a string, I have started using this syntax in Tcl from time to time:

DELETE FROM gcms_rels
WHERE revision_id = :revision_id
[if { [exists_and_not_null rel_options] } {
    set x "AND related_item_id IN ([join $rel_options ", "])"
}]

It is pretty much exactly the same thing as in Ruby, and also very similar to the use of ad_decode that we’ve been using in OpenACS for a while. But it is superior to ad_decode because it is more readable, and because you can have elseif, switch, or any other construct in there.

The only ugly thing is the dummy set x part, which is required because, unlike Ruby, Tcl will interpret "foo" on a line by itself as the name of a command to be executed. I also tried using return, but that blows out of the entire proc, so isn’t usable.

If you have a cleaner solution, I would like to hear about it.