Language mavens: Is there a programming with "if then else ENDIF" syntax?

[James Harris]

On 16 Nov, 16:54, Steve Ferg <steve.ferg.bitbuc... at gmail.com> wrote:
> This is a question for the language mavens that I know hang out here.
> It is not Python related, except that recent comparisons of Python to
> Google's new Go language brought it to mind.
>
> NOTE that this is *not* a suggestion to change Python.  I like Python
> just the way it is.  I'm just curious about language design.
>
> For a long time I've wondered why languages still use blocks
> (delimited by do/end, begin/end, { } , etc.) in ifThenElse statements.
>
> I've often thought that a language with this kind of block-free syntax
> would be nice and intuitive:
>
>     if <condition> then
>         do stuff
>     elif <condition> then
>         do stuff
>     else
>         do stuff
>     endif
>
> Note that you do not need block delimiters.
>
> Obviously, you could make a more Pythonesque syntax by using a colon
> rather then "then" for the condition terminator.  You could make it
> more PL/I-like by using "do", etc.
>
> You can write shell scripts using if ... fi, but other than that I
> don't recall a language with this kind of syntax.
>
> Does anybody know a language with this kind of syntax for
> ifThenElseEndif?
>
> Is there any particular reason why this might be a *bad* language-
> design idea?

There are some. For example, Ada uses similar. See

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_%28programming_language%29#Control_structures

These other newsgroups may be of interest:

  comp.programming
  comp.lang.misc

The latter is used by people designing programming languages where you
can find knowledgeable comments aplenty.

James