static if enhancement

[cym13 via Digitalmars-d]

On Monday, 27 June 2016 at 08:16:18 UTC, Claude wrote:
> On Saturday, 25 June 2016 at 11:27:01 UTC, cym13 wrote:
>> We are talking about early returns (checking for something and
>> returning as soon as possible) which are a well-known and 
>> efficient
>> way to reduce indentation levels and increase modularity. You 
>> can't
>> come and say "What? You want it to work? Man, you should have 
>> thought
>> your code better!": the very reason this subject is discussed 
>> is to
>> allow people to deal with indentation levels!
>
> I didn't want to sound like that. But my post was unclear. 
> Though, in the example, it looks nice, and I understand one 
> would want such a feature. I think it could be abused in some 
> other cases and make the code less readable.
>
> I had in mind some cross-platform libraries written in C with 
> #if #elif and #endif all other the place (used with compiler 
> switches). And I reckon the current "static if" is a good tool 
> that fits well with the rest of the language to properly mark 
> different sections of code, and have different implementations. 
> The fact it gives another indentation level could be seen as an 
> opportunity to better modularize code (it's what I meant).
>
> So I find that special case (having code after a "static if() 
> {return;}" treated like in the "else" block) a bit unintuitive, 
> and could be prone to bad practice and confusion.

What's unintuitive about it (real question)? It would make it 
behave more like a standard if and early returns are very common, 
well understood and good practice:

void func(int* somepointer) {
     if (somepointer == null)
         return;
     [rest of the code]
}

When seeing such code (which generally leads to cleaner 
functions) the meaning is quite obvious, I fail to see who would 
expect static if to behave otherwise. Of course knowing how it 
works it makes sense that making it work that way isn't easy but 
it sounds more like a leaky abstraction than something more 
intuitive to me.