On 20 Sep 2008, at 20:44, Josiah Carlson wrote:
On Sat, Sep 20, 2008 at 11:35 AM, Arnaud Delobelle
[...] I think that this would look better:
while True: do something break if condition do something else
It gets worse ;)
break if condition
Also implies...
continue if condition
That's true, why not? I don't use use continue so much but it seems logical.
Never mind
break if condition else continue continue if condition else break
No that would be silly.
Because who would want to write... break if condition continue
or continue if condition break
The problem is: when would you need to do this? I pointed out in my original post that almost half of uses of 'break' in the py3k python source come immediately after an 'if'. Now I have never used or seen this:
if condition: break continue
What would be the point of spelling it 'break if condition else continue'? It would even defeat the idea behind my suggestion, which is to make the structure of a loop more obvious when you scan code: you can spot the 'break if' (and 'continue if'!) statements just by scanning the left hand side of the loop body.
But if we can break or continue, why not others? What's wrong with a raise (especially if we surround everything with parens...)?
(raise Exception("X")) if condition
Never mind assert, yield, throw, return, ... I hope this horse is dead now.
You have implied one reason why not: raise, assert, yield, throw, return all take an argument which can be an if-expression, so this would make those statements difficult to parse if you are human (and I suspect impossible if you are the Python parser).
The fact that neither break nor continue take arguments makes them very 'poor' in the amount of meaning they convey. That's why a lot of people feel like writing the following in one single line.
if condition: break
Moreover, because we don't have a 'do .. while' construct, 'break' is more important than in other languages to shape loops (especially while loops), so I thought it would be useful to make it easier to spot. The same argument can be made about 'continue' of course.
- Josiah