This is really two questions. We could have a non-ambiguous keyword (eg break-from-expression-switch); that’s separate from the keyword vs operator story.
To the latter, I think the simple answer is: all existing control flow operations (return, throw, break, etc) are words. This does not seem sufficiently different to change paradigms by creating an operator. To the former, this is a trade off between spec complexity and reading clarity. To this, the question of whether this is a good trade off is a reasonable one. If the complexity can be reasonably bounded, I think most people prefer a new verb to the set of things that can be constructed with real unambiguous keywords, but this is surely subjective. Sent from my MacBook Wheel > On May 27, 2019, at 4:06 PM, Doug Lea <d...@cs.oswego.edu> wrote: > > > I don't enjoy being the token curmudgeon here, but I find it > increasingly hard to appreciate why a non-ambiguous choice (prefix "^") > with precedence in related languages should be rejected in favor of one > requiring context-sensitive grammar mangling with some known odd > consequences. At the very least, could someone help check as-yet-unknown > impact by using candidate parsers on large source corpuses (for example > http://groups.inf.ed.ac.uk/cup/javaGithub/, google-internal, etc)? > > -Doug > >
