Jonathan M Davis wrote:
Sean Kelly wrote:
Jonathan M Davis Wrote:
In any case, that means that it could be made required to have a control
statement at the end of a case block without having to specify a specific
destination for fallthrough - though I'd prefer "continue switch" over
"goto case" since it's more explicit and less error prone (since there's
no doubt that you didn't intend to put a destination for the goto if you
use "continue switch" instead of a "goto case" without a destination).
It's a small thing, but I think "continue switch" could be misleading.
Consider this:
switch (getState()) {
case X:
setState(Z);
continue switch;
case Y:
break;
case Z:
writeln( "done!" );
}
Having never encountered D before, what would be your interpretation of
this code?
I hadn't thought of that. That could be a source of confusion. However,
since a switch statement isn't a loop, and it's not a construct in any other
language AFAIK, the person will look it up. Once you've looked it up, I
don't think that it would be particularly hard to remember what it actually
does. It's quite clear what's going once you've become familiar with the
construct and is quite unambiguous in comparison to "goto case" which could
easily be missing the target case rather than being meant for fallthrough.
So, perhaps it's not immediately intuitive, but many language constructs
are, and I think that it's fairly clear once you've looked it up. Having
something like "fallthrough" or "goto next case" would of course be even
clearer, but those would require new keywords. I still think that "continue
switch" would be clearer than "goto case" as well as less error prone.
Personally, I think that the fact that it's less error prone alone makes it
a better choice even if it were somewhat less clear.
- Jonathan M Davis
But 'goto case XXX' is an extremely rarely encountered construct, that
screams 'Examine this code closely'. So I don't think it needs extra
error checking.
