Re: [q-lang-users] RFC: Conditional syntax

[Albert G. <Dr....@t-...>]

Hi Keith,

Keith Trenton wrote:
> 1. Wrt the <ifelse> function, I prefer keeping "ifelse X Y Z"; it is clean and concise.

You can use both. Internally "if X then Y else Z" and "ifelse X Y Z" are 
exactly the same. The former will be used for unparsing now (keeping in 
line with the philosophy that the pretty-printer should unparse 
expressions with as much syntactic sugar as possible), but I can easily 
take that out again; it's just the pretty-printing, so it doesn't really 
matter as long it's re-parseable.

It's already implemented and in CVS now. I don't see any problems 
arising from the new syntax, but I can easily back it out if it's 
necessary or if enough ppl complain.

> 2. Wrt multi-way and matching conditionals, I prefer your option (1); however, I would be equally happy if BOTH options (1) and (2) were implemented. I personally dislike curly braces "{}" (they remind me of my Perl days ;-); however, option (2) is consistent with the new stream syntax, so I can live with it (but I prefer using Lispy-parens).

Yeah, (1) looks nicer for me, too (although I prefer (2) for technical 
reasons). And the listof/streamof special forms also take tuples for the 
sequences of clauses, so it would be consistent with that.

Other opinions?

 > 3. Wrt grouping inside tuples, etc., I can only say, "cool".

Yes, I think that the grouping thing would be quite useful for other 
purposes, too, so I'd probably implement it anyway.

 > Or does that date me too much?

Being an old hand myself, I don't know. Isn't "cool" "leet" anymore? Or 
do we all have to write "kewl" now? ;-)

Cheers,
Albert

-- 
Dr. Albert Gr"af
Dept. of Music-Informatics, University of Mainz, Germany
Email:  Dr....@t-..., ag...@mu...
WWW:    http://www.musikinformatik.uni-mainz.de/ag