advantages of jade mixin over plain functions?

Question

After playng for some time with jade I still can't understand advantages of jade mixins over plain javascript functions. I found a disadvantage, however: I can't find a way to assign a mixin to a variable and then call it indirectly (I know the hack with jade_mixins[name_of_mixin] but it is unreliable, implementation-dependent and ugly)

So my questions are:

1) Is it possible to assign a mixin to variable/property and then call it indirectly?

2) Are there any advantages of mixins over functions at all except of syntactic sugar in declaration head?

Answer 1

Yes, you can use normal #{..} interpolation syntax to dynamically call a mixin.

div
  +#{templateName}(templateArgument)

The fact that jade mixins are implemented as functions is an implementation detail. One can use jade and jade-mixins without having to know javascript - so the syntax sugar may be helpful for template authors who see jade as an alternative syntax to html (rather than a javascript based templating system).