Suggestion: new switch statement

[Rioshin an'Harthen]

"Chad J" <gamerChad at _spamIsBad_gmail.com> wrote:
> At the same time, I can't stand the fall-through default behavior!  It
> is a source of bugs, and I've already been hit by it a few times in D
> and spent hours trying to find the bug in a switch statement that
> behaves subtly different than what I expected.
>
> I've read that this is maintained in D to keep it easy to port C code
> over to D.  That's understandable, especially if you want to make break
> the default, which would change the meaning of code without any warning.
>
> I'd suggest though, that you don't allow a default ending for case
> blocks at all.  Mandate that each case block be followed by an escape
> like 'break', 'return', 'goto', 'throw', etc.  That way, the compiler
> would throw an error when C code that uses fallthroughs is inadvertently
> used as D code.  Also, this is one of those things from C/C++ that is
> bad.  D is supposed to get rid of those bad things even if it means
> losing backwards compatibility, so please get rid of this bad thing that
> comes from C.
>
> I also like Mike's suggestion on this thread a lot.  It could even be 
> combined with my suggestion.  I'd say use Mike's suggestion, and only 
> apply my suggestion to the colon blocks.  Since the brackets and 
> one-liners are not valid C syntax AFAIK, the compiler won't need to 
> mandate anything about them to flush out bugs from incoming C code.  On 
> the developer side, this trades nasty runtime bugs for some small amount 
> of hunting down compiler errors and fixing them.  A good trade IMO.  Not 
> sure what the cost would be to compiler writers like Walter, but please at 
> least implement the mandatory ending on the current case blocks, or 
> something just as good.

Me, too.

I hate forgetting to type a break statement at the end of a case. It's 
usually a pain in the *** to find. Enforcing the break, continue, etc. at 
the end of a case is a good way to remove unnecessary bugs.

Thus, votes++