Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!seismo!uwvax!oddjob!gargoyle!ihnp4!alberta!auvax!rwa
From: rwa@auvax.UUCP (Ross Alexander)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: goto's and switch statements -- mild proposal
Message-ID: <298@auvax.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 13-Aug-87 07:08:16 EDT
Article-I.D.: auvax.298
Posted: Thu Aug 13 07:08:16 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 15-Aug-87 09:45:52 EDT
References: <855@tjalk.cs.vu.nl> <2683@hoptoad.uucp> <916@haddock.ISC.COM> <1100@geac.UUCP>
Sender: news@auvax.UUCP
Organization: Athabasca U., Alberta, Canada
Lines: 22
Summary: another case proposal...

In article <1100@geac.UUCP>, daveb@geac.UUCP (Brown) writes:
>   This is NOT a proposal for C (its for P, as in BCPL).
>   One should restrict the range of gotos referring to switch/case/whatever
> labels to the body of the switch, as in:
> 	case 'f' | 'e':		-- one possible syntax...
> 		goto case 'a';	-- another possible syntax

A long time ago, when I was young and dinosaurs roamed the woods, I did
some hacking in a dialect of B called B+ (Reinhaldo de Braga, take a bow).
It supported a construct in case labels that we called 'a range case'.
it looked something like

	case 'a' - 'z' : <your code here>

and could be mixed with regular case labels and 'default' quite freely.
The impementation was very compact and efficient on the particular
architecture if the domain of cases wasn't too sparse, and the syntax
was very handy - I didn't want to enumerate the alphabet (yes, that
raises EBCDIC problems, but everything has gotcha's) in the example
above, and this way I didn't have to.

...!ihnp4!alberta!auvax!rwa	Ross Alexander @ Athabasca University