OpenEuphoria

Re: Optional "then" and "do"

• Posted by Fernando Bauer <fmbauer at hotma?l?com> May 14, 2008
• 1099 views

Kat wrote:
> 
> Larry Miller wrote:
> > 
> > yuku wrote:
> > > 
> > > I made changes to the parser.e so that the keyword "then" and "do"
> > > is optional (if the coder wants that it is still accepted).
> > > 
> > > Reasons:
> > > 
> > > - Less typing
> > > 
> > > - Prevent mistakes of writing if <expr> do  and  for <expr> then
> > >   which I did a lot of times (Kat too)
> 
> Confirmed, especially when changing code from one loop form to another to get
> program flow to use exit correctly. I often wonder why "then" and "do" aren't
> the same word. 

Me too. I think both 'do' and 'then' exist to mark the beginning of a executable
block of code. So, if they are synonyms, one of them is superfluous and could be
eliminated (in my opinion 'then').

A similar case occurs with '..' (slice operator) and 'to' (historical note: ZX81
BASIC uses 'TO' for 'FOR' statements and also for slices). Both have the meaning
of a range. In this case I would keep with '..'.
Then, we could write something like this:

for i = 1..10 do
   if i=3 do exit end if
end for

[snipped]

Just some provocative thoughts! 

- Fernando