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Enrico Tassi wrote:
On Fri, Sep 10, 2010 at 06:01:28PM -0300, Roberto Ierusalimschy wrote:On the other hand, a syntax with "end" is cumbersome.I find it nice instead, it just looks like if the if-then-else-end construct had been promoted from the statement class to the expression's one. Maybe I'm too biased by functional languages, but I very often type, by mistake, "z = if b then x else y end"... Cheers, and +1 for that "feature".
Another +1. I too find myself typing it. I cannot train my brain to stop! I have a small preference for requiring 'end', just for consistency with the statement version.
The 'x and y or z' construct is not elegant for this type of expression, though I do find myself using 'x = x or default' for function arguments.
As you know when saying it *just looks like* the statement has been promoted to expression, adding if-then-else-end to the 'exp' element in http://www.lua.org/manual/5.1/manual.html#8 does not allow it to be removed from the 'stat' section. Lua currently does not allow "empty" expressions as statements; the expressions have to go somewhere.
But I sometimes daydream about making all of Lua's statements into expressions, removing 'stat' altogether. Lua would then be a functional language with a concise imperative syntax, easily learned by those coming from such a background. We could add an optional argument to 'break'. We could choose natural return value(s) of 'for-do-end' or 'while-do-end'. We could do all the Lispy things that some of us love to do. To be fair, Lua supports most such things already. And with words, not operators, David Kastrup couldn't complain about line noise! :)
So thanks, Ryota Hirose.Your patch works well for me. It might compel me to add it to my base Lua installation. It also serves as a good template for playing with other statements-as-functions. I can see expr() in lparser.c becoming a switch statement on the next token. Can you say "eval"?
Doug