On Sat, Sep 20, 2008 at 11:35 AM, Arnaud Delobelle arnodel@googlemail.com wrote:
Hello,
It seems to me that a lot of the time that I use a break statement, it is directly after an if. Typically:
while True: do something if condition: break do something else
I don't like so much the if .. break which is spread over two lines. Of course I could write
while True: do something if condition: break do something else
It doesn't read so well either IMHO. I think that this would look better:
while True: do something break if condition do something else
For some reason this suggestion reminds me of Icon.
Anyway, so I take it this suggestion is to extend the break statement to have an 'if' trailer? Or are you trying to make 'break' an expression?
If you are after the former, the problem with that is that the special-casing of 'if' might confuse people because they will suddenly want an 'else' clause. Adding that might then cause a naive user to see ``break if x`` and then think 'break' is an expression.
Which leads to its own issues. How do you implement 'break' as an expression? It doesn't make much sense to have ``fxn(a, break, b)`` inside a loop. And you can't say 'break' can only appear in the true clause of an 'if' expression as that is too specialized and will lead to potential misuse of the statement (or at least an attempt).
I don't see enough benefit from the change to warrant dealing with any of the above issues.
-Brett