bearophile wrote:
Yigal Chripun:
also, some thought should be spent on getting rid of the ternary op
syntax since it interferes with other things that could be added to the
language (nullable types, for instance)
But a ternary operator is sometimes handy: when used judiciously it may help the mind of
the person that reads the code to form a "chunk", improving code readability a
little.
And if you want to modify/remove it you have to remember that D is usually designed to
act as C when a C syntax is accepted (even if this leads to some bad things, see the
syntax of the "switch" statement or the casting mess).
There are many possible alternative syntaxes for the ternary operator. Python
in the end has accepted this one:
z = 1 if x else y
That for example can be used like this:
print n, "item" + ("" if a == 1 else "s")
Bye,
bearophile
Sorry, I guess I wasn't clear. I meant to say: remove the *current*
syntax of the trenary operator. making "if" an expression is one
possible solution to this, as you noted above.
Maybe it's just me but all those C-style statements seem so arcane and
unnessaccary. real OOP languages do not need control structures to be
part of the language - they're part of the class library instead.
Here's some Smalltalk examples: (and D-like comparable code)
10 times: [ code ]. // 10.times({ code to be repeated });
map each: [ code ]. // map.each((Type val){ code to be repeated })
(var > 5) ifTrue: [] ifFalse: [] // (var > 5).IfTrueFalse(dgTrue, dgFalse);
// reverse the order with a different method of boolean objects
var (var > 5) ifFalse: [] ifTrue: []
// use just one of the branches:
var (var < 6) ifFalse: []
I guess D is unlikely to adopt the above...
