if-expressions

[Bent Rasmussen]

I've been away from D for quite a while, but am anxious to get back and use 
the new features.

Reading the newsgroup to catch up a little, I remembered a feature of 
another language (haXe) I've been using for some light-weight work. It has 
the nice property that `if´ is an expression. So I was wondering if this 
would be nice in D as well...

int lim(int x, int a, int b)
{
    return if (x < a)
        a
    else if (x > b)
        b
    else
        x;
}

But it could also be written

int lim(int x, int a, int b)
{
    return x < a ?
        a
    : x > b ?
        b
    :
        x;
}

The question is if very nested ?: expressions will look very readable, in 
isolation and compared to if's.

I've found if-expressions to be changing my coding style and making my code 
cleaner and a lot more readable. The same goes for switch-expressions. Many 
functions have turned into pure expressions with just one point of return.

I'll try and recode some libraries using ?: expressions to begin with and 
see how it shapes up visually.

If this all sounds stupid, be gentle, I'm just returning to the D game 
again. :-)

Regards
Bent