Le Wed, May 12, 2004 at 02:00:42AM +0200, le valeureux mongueur Pedro Larroy a dit:
Hi
Is there any chance that in perl6 there will be the possibility to write if/else statements without {}s with the condition at the beginning?
Like
if (condition) statement;
In order not to break traditional C culture. Is there any technical
reason why it wasn't done in perl5?
In Perl5, variable declaration are an executable statement. Also the scope of a variable starts from its declaration and ends at the end of the immediately enclosing block. Things would get problematic if the branches of an if/else were not scoped. What would be the meaning of :
if (condition) my $foo = 'bar'; else print $foo;
Not entirely sure, but according to the camel book, another reason for the braces being compulsory is that Perl makes a distinction between a block and a statement, whereas in C a block is actually (sometimes) a kind of statement - indeed a compound statement. Of course, it's possible that was just an excuse, but it does make a fair bit of sense. Especially since Perl's got things like anonymous subroutines and closures, which are sort of fancy blocks, and ultimately one has to realise that { and } don't mean the same thing in Perl at all. They just *look* like they do.
I am actually glad to see Perl 6 extending this trend, as it seems to be using { and } for Good Things. I wouldn't argue at all that it's important to keep familiarity for C programmers anymore (so sayeth the Haskell programmer), although it might perhaps be a little early to go for Python-like syntax. For some reason, lots of people don't like it when indentation is what's controlling their code structure...
