statements in control structures (Re: Conditional Expressions don't solve the problem)

[Markus Schaber]

Hello,

> Thanks for finding some concrete, realistics examples of what the
> proposed change would lead to.  

That's correct, the examle was worse than the original.

A genious one-liner is not always better than five lines of readable code.

> To me, that 'while' line is convincing
> evidence againt this syntax.  What bothers me is this.  ';' is a
> statement separator (whose use is generally discouraged).  What the
> proposed change means is that a 'while' at the beginning of the
> sequence means that the last statement is instead to be a condition.
> This requires a sort of mental suspension that I believe many besides
> me would find obnoxious.

This is why I'd vote for something like:

do some; statements while condition:
  pass #This could be your code


I know this involves a new keyword, and it might be difficult to get the parser parse this (as the do-while would be one statement containing ;-separated statements), but the code is executed in the same order as it is written, and ; really divides statements.

Maybe this form could be expanded to allow:

do
  some
  statements
while cond:
  something
  else

Making the last part optional (or inserting pass), we also would get the "check condition at end of loop" case.

markus
-- 
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