On 20 Sep 2008, at 20:07, Brett Cannon wrote:
On Sat, Sep 20, 2008 at 11:35 AM, Arnaud Delobelle <arnodel@googlemail.com> wrote:
[...] 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?
No I wasn't suggesting this.
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.
I thought that the meaning of e.g. break if x < 1 was clear and unambiguous. I don't know if some people do, but I personally have never felt the need to write something like: expression1 if condition else expression2 on its own on a line. So I wouldn't find the above 'break if x < 1' statement confusing :)
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 certainly wouldn't want 'break' to be an expression.
I don't see enough benefit from the change to warrant dealing with any of the above issues.
Fair enough!
-Brett
-- Arnaud