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From: mathew@mantis.co.uk (Giving C News a *HUG*)
Newsgroups: alt.religion.computers,comp.windows.ms.programmer
Subject: Re: ap, Windows BASIC
Message-ID: <u04V412w164w@mantis.co.uk>
Date: 21 Jun 91 11:54:41 GMT
References: <91171.094549F0O@psuvm.psu.edu>
Organization: Mantis Consultants, Cambridge. UK.
Lines: 86

F0O@psuvm.psu.edu writes:
> In article <4k4q47w164w@mantis.co.uk>, mathew@mantis.co.uk (Giving C News a
> *HUG*) says:
> >What, you mean it allows general boolean expressions for each CASE, like
> >Clipper 5.0 does?  That makes it just syntactic sugar; most other languages
> >have the same feature available, they just call it IF...ELSEIF...ENDIF.
> 
>    Two examples should get my point across:
> 
>    This segment will match strings that are exactly equal to "everything"
> the current value of AnotherString, or that fall between "nuts" and "soup"
> in alphabetical order
> 
>    SELECT CASE AStringVariable
>       CASE "everything", "nuts" TO "soup", AnotherString
>       ...
>    END SELECT

That's just
   IF AStringVariable = "everything" OR AStringVariable = AnotherString OR
      (AStringVariable > "nuts" AND AStringVariable < "soup")
   ...
   ELSE
   ...
   ENDIF

In other words, the SELECT CASE you mention is just syntactic sugar for
IF...ELSE...ENDIF.

If you happen to prefer the CASE syntax, in C++ you could write yourself a
quick macro.  And if you want to do lots of comparisons like the one you
mention, you could write yourself a quick macro in C++, or a function in
Modula-2 or Pascal.

>    This code will compare ANumericVariable for numbers between 1 and 4,
> 7 to 9, 11, 13, or if ANumericVariable > MaxNumber
> 
>    SELECT CASE ANumericVariable
>       CASE 1 to 4, 7 to 9, 11, 13, IS > MaxNumber
>       ...
>       CASE ELSE
>       ...
>    END SELECT

IF ANumericVariable IN { 1,2,3,4, 7,8,9, 11, 13 } OR ANumericVariable >
   MaxNumber
   ...
ELSE
   ...
ENDIF

Pascal and Modula-2 both have suitable set operations to do this. It'll be a
bit more work in C++, but not much.

In Lisp, both examples are pretty trivial (cond ...) expressions.

> >>                         It is a fully structured language except for the
> >> fact you can't have nested blocks as in Pascal.
> >That's like saying it's fully object-oriented except it doesn't have
> >inheritance...
> 
>    Could be, except I don't use nested blocks very often, so I don't miss
> it too much.

Precisely!  Because you don't have the feature, you've never used it. So you
don't know how useful and important it is. And then when you move up to a
better language, you're trapped in the BASIC mindset.

> >> I like about the QB environment is when you press the F2 key, a window
> >> pops up with a list of all your procedures/functions.  Click on the one
> >> you want to look at and bingo.  Very nice.
> >My editor does that, for C, C++, Pascal, Modula-2, Clipper, or any other
> >language you care to tell it about.
> 
>    Which editor is that, and how hard was it to set up?

Brief. I put the disk in and typed "SETUP", and told it which languages I
would be using. Selected from a menu.

Oh, and I wrote a couple of pages of code to re-bind the editor keys to what
I'm used to.  I take it I could do the same with QuickBASIC?


mathew