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statements in control structures (Re: Conditional Expressions don't solve the problem)

John Roth johnroth at ameritech.net
Fri Oct 19 13:21:47 EDT 2001 
"Huaiyu Zhu" <huaiyu at gauss.almadan.ibm.com> wrote in message
news:slrn9sruhl.ll.huaiyu at gauss.almadan.ibm.com...
> I've been writing this for several evenings.  It's not polished, but IMHO
it
> solves most of the problems discussed in this thread.  So here it goes.
:-)
>
<snip to save space>

I've been away for a couple of days, so I'm going to comment on
several of the issues raised in the discussion in one place.

1. I totally agree with the posters that the proposed syntax will
cause unnecessary confusion. If it was required that such a suite
had to be surrounded by some delimiters (either brackets or
braces, not parens) it would make it much more visually distinctive,
as well as handle the continuation problem which either hasn't been
mentioned, or which I missed.

2. Given the existence of iterators in 2.2, I don't know how much
this would add to the while statement. Since it doesn't have quite
the right semantics for the 'increment' function of a loop, I suspect
not that much.

3. However, I am absolutely in favor of something like this for
the 'elif' statement. I can let it go for 'if' - it's identical to just
putting the statements in front of the if statement, after all.
I find it a rather frequent occurrence (and this may be a comment
on my programming style) to have to stop a series of 'elif's to
make a computation that is now possible, and which supports
later 'elif's. Currently, that requires stopping the entire 'if'
sequence, with the attendant issues of making the sequence
end properly. It gets rather ugly.

John Roth
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