This one time, at band camp, Benno wrote:
>On Fri Jun 16, 2006 at 18:29:48 +1000, Erik de Castro Lopo wrote:
>>Yes it is, a concept borrowed from Perl. I even allows brain damage
>>like:
>>
>>
>> {
>> # Huge chunk of code.
>> }
>> unless condition
>
>Not trying to troll here, but what is exactly the point of it? It feels
>kinda intercal, lets change things around to confuse the programmer.
>
>I guess there are some cases where it is more natural to say (in english),
>"do something unless condition", than, "if not condition do something".
>Is that the rationale behind the language feature?
I've used it (post-conditionals) in Perl for some scripts that do Important
Things in the interest of making it more readable to future mes.
Depending on the context, of course:
while (<WEBALIZER>) {
if (! -t STDOUT) {
next if (m/Truncating oversized \w+ field/);
next if (m/Truncating oversized hostname/);
next if (m/String exceeds storage size/);
next if (m/No valid records found/);
next if (m/Skipping oversized log record/);
next if (m/Skipping bad record/);
}
print $_;
}
basically skips printing a bunch of stuff; reordering that would have
increased the code size by at least double and I reckon would have made it
less clear what it did.
I wouldn't ever use it in the way Erik described though, clearly that's a
lose for readability. Postconditional should only be used for one-liners.
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