Jamie McCracken wrote:
What about cases where the index should run from low(myarray) to pred(high(myarray)), e. g. when bubble-sorting? In such cases, you would still have to use the "classical" form, and end up with two different syntaxes.Marco van de Voort wrote:
2. For Each. Its in Delphi 2005 and every modern language implements it.
Yeah, and I still wonder why. There is nothing to gain with it.
one less variable to manually declare
Implement something in lazarus that auto-adds the variable to the local var
section. No need for language extensions.
My mistake it actually avoids initialising the loop variable rather than not declaring it:
for i in myarray do myarray[i] := 0;
as opposed to
for i := low(myarray) to high (myarray) do myarray[i] := 0;
I think the for..in is much clearer and more compact (it works for sets, arrays and other enumerated types)
jamie.
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And please note: It's often the more difficult, and more "intelligent" algorithms like sorting, comparison, ..., where i does -not- run from 0 to n-1 but, e. g. from 0 to n-2.
I mean, the for-statement has a long but very clear syntax, and there's nothing superfluous in it. It's an assignment plus a bound, with an implicit increment.
Maybe in 90 % of the cases a "for i in blah" would be shorter, but you'd lose control over what actually happens, as the next step would probably be that the compiler may determine the direction or even order of the iterations.
IMHO, this general critics about losing control holds for your other proposals, too. Pascal is and will always be a -procedural- language with OO extensions, and is thus well suited for writing things like drivers or OSs, too; whereas your proposals, as far as I understand them, would lead to something like a compiled spreadsheet language like MS excel.
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