Hello, I've tried and failed at finding any previous discussion on this topic, so do point me to one if it exists.
I'm interested to know whether it was considered (I can't imagine that it wasn't) for if and switch statements to be expressions instead, and if so, why were they ultimately left as statements. It seems to me that having them as expressions will not cause a significant change in how they are ultimately used, mostly because other languages that do support such expressions do not exhibit this behaviour either. Nor is such a change strictly backwards incompatible, since any expression is also technically a statement as well, via the ExpressionStmt grammar rule. Such expressions also cover a simple feature which a lot of people new to the language are looking for, and most of us have abused in other languages - ternary operators. The Go FAQ states that if-elses are clearer, if longer, which I definitely agree with. Yet it seems that an if expression would retain its readability, if not outright increase it, while allowing for terser assignments. The reason being that a chunk of repeatable code (for example assigning to the same variable in every logical branch) would be moved out of the whole block, thus highlighting the value. What if the spec defines that if all if-else blocks / all switch case clauses contain only single expression, they would be expressions rather than statements. How would that negatively impact the language, in a way that can't already be reproduced? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "golang-nuts" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to golang-nuts+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
