Re: switch statement
- Posted by jeremy (admin) Mar 25, 2009
- 1370 views
sequence value = "red" switch value do case "apple": case "pear": case "orange": puts(1, "It's a fruit!\n") break case "yellow": case "blue": case "red": puts(1, "It's a color!\n") break case else puts(1, "I have no clue what it is\n") end switch -- Output is "It's a color!"
This is still the dumbest conditional construct I've ever encountered. Didn't the devs discover that in most cases, break will be used and, therefore, making it NOT default is the friendlier option?
And go against every other programming languages definition of a switch, I don't think that would be wise. Sure, we are not PHP, but people understand an if statement. What if we were to flip it around? People would be totally confused.
if 1=1 then puts(1, "1 is not = 1\n") else puts(1, "1 is 1\n") end if
This is the same as changing the way switch works. It's totally foreign for the switch construct.
I understand that your example above is not an optimal use case for switch, but I've never actually seen one either. Can you access the dev list archives? Maybe there was a convincing example there.
Um, actually my example of the colors, fruits, etc... is a valid construct for switch. There's nothing wrong with that example.
And isn't there a select construct available in 4.0? I thought I had seen and even used it. 
No.
Anyway, why not something like this:
sequence value = "red" ,fruits = {"apple","pear","orange"} switch value do case in fruits: puts(1, "It's a fruit!\n") case in {"yellow","blue","red"}: puts(1, "It's a color!\n") case else puts(1, "I have no clue what it is
This takes away quite a bit of power from switch as you cannot do specific things based on one item. I was working up an example and then I saw that ghaberek just posted one...
By the way, it doesn't look like select or switch are documented in the Manual! Or did I just miss it?
http://openeuphoria.org/docs/eu400_0010.html#_103_switchstatement
Jeremy
