new DIP5: Properties 2

[Bill Baxter]

On Tue, Jul 28, 2009 at 12:01 PM, bearophile<bearophileHUGS at lycos.com> wrote:
> Bill Baxter:
>> Switch is a monstrosity pretty much any way you look at it.  Sh had the right
>> idea there.  Is "case" really necessary there?  Some syntax should
>> suffice I would thing.  And "default" is probably the world's most
>> useless keyword.  Why not "else:" or "*:" instead of introducing a
>> whole new keyword?
>
> Case of Pascal is better (2 keywords where "of" isn't that useful, begin-end are optional if you want more than one instruction, Pascal isn't case-sensitive):
>
> Case X of
>  1: Begin
>        ...
>      End;
>  2 .. 10: Begin
>        ...
>      End;
>  ...
>  Else Begin
>         ...
>       End;
> End; {CASE}
>
> But D is backward compatible with C (unlike languages like Scala, that eventually D will need to take a look at), so this is an academic topic.

Except that it's very much not backwards compatible with C syntax in
constructs that are very frequent in C: typedef/alias, #define.
Changing the keywords used in a switch would be a very mechanical
transformation, like changing typedef to alias everywhere it appears
in C code you're translating.

--bb