[Tutor] Perl refugee

[Erik Price]

On Friday, April 26, 2002, at 10:38  PM, dman wrote:

> IME switch statements are rarely used (even in C/C++/Java) anyways,
> and in the situations where it might be useful a dictionary lookup can
> be much more elegant.

I use them religiously in PHP for web site development.  Often a PHP 
"script" will have more than one "instantiation".  That is to say, it 
displays a different page (from the user's perspective) depending on 
what data it is working with.  Usually I use an HTML hidden form field 
to send a variable named "action" which could do something like this 
(pseudocode based on Python):

# this is a form that accepts user input and enters it into a database
switch(action):
   case 'commit':
     commit data to database (execute query)
     print success message to user
     break
   case 'confirm':
     print a confirmation message with yes/no button
     including a hidden form field sending
     POST variable 'action=commit'
     break
   case 'display_form':
     print an HTML form to accept user input
     including a hidden form field sending POST
     variable 'action=confirm'
     break
   default:
     print instructions for user
     button to send POST variable 'action=display_form'


Of course, they get a bit more complex than that, but that's why I like 
switch() -- because sometimes I want the user to cascade down into the 
next case statement to do some other thing, so I don't have a "break" at 
the end of the case that picked up the "action" variable.  Anyway, it's 
a nice feature, but since I haven't yet done any real dynamic HTML with 
Python I haven't really missed.

and Python more than makes up for it by being more fully object-oriented.


Erik