On Tue, May 11, 2004 at 08:31:55PM -0400, Andrew Rodland wrote:
: On Tuesday 11 May 2004 08:00 pm, Pedro Larroy wrote:
: > Hi
: >
: > Is there any chance that in perl6 there will be the possibility to write
: > if/else statements without {}s with the condition at the beginning?
: >
: > Like
: >
: > if (condition)
: > statement;
: >
: > In order not to break traditional C culture. Is there any technical
: > reason why it wasn't done in perl5?
:
: My understanding is that it was mostly a /(counter)?cultural/ decision, to
: make dangling-else syndrome impossible. For the same reason "else if" is
: spelled "elsif", so there doesn't have to be a special braceless exception
: for "else".
:
: It might also be wise to note that if your statement is really that simple and
: important, you might be better off writing "statement if condition".
:
: Yes, I know that I'm diverting rather than strictly answering. My personal
: opinion is that I can live with it, because I've shot myself in that
: particular foot before, and that there are good reasons. My other opinion is
: that I wouldn't mind if a particular rule in the grammar could be enabled /
: disabled with "use strict 'braces'" either, as it is somewhat unperlish to
: prevent footshooting for that sake alone.
That's gonna be pretty unlikely. We've basically decided that, in
terms of readability, it makes a whole lot more sense to get rid of
the parens than the curlies, and you can't make both the parens and
the curlies optional.
Perl 1 had to maintain a lot of compatibility with C for general
acceptance (the bracketing rule being a glaring exception to that).
We think that nowadays we can edge away from some of the less useful
C heritage, as long as we stay close enough to our Perl heritage.
(Some would say we've already blown it there... :-)
Larry
