Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!apple!ames!elroy!ucla-cs!uci-ics!milne
From: milne@ics.uci.edu (Alastair Milne)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.pascal
Subject: Re: C Ternary Conditional Expression?
Message-ID: <15926@paris.ics.uci.edu>
Date: 27 May 89 03:59:59 GMT
References: <950025@hpclcdb.HP.COM> <6490002@hplsla.HP.COM> <1344@ruuinf.cs.ruu.nl>
Sender: news@paris.ics.uci.edu
Reply-To: Alastair Milne <milne@ics.uci.edu>
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Organization: Educational Technology Center, Dept. of ICS, UC Irvine
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>... Personally, I would like to write the above as
>
>      a[ IF index = last_index THEN last_val ELSE f(index) ] := a[ y ] ;
>
>This would extend the IF-statement to conditional expressions, which in my
>view is a higher-level construct than the conditional statement in Pascal,
>because it allows one to write better readable code.

    Even putting complicated indexing expressions into []'s is enough
    seriously to compromise readability.  Having an entire statement lodged 
    in them seems to me even worse.  The contention that this code is more
    readable seems to me quite unsupported.

    Years ago, ALGOL allowed IF's to return a value, and one could construct
    just this sort of thing.  Wirth, apparently deliberately, left it out of
    Pascal.  Before we start wishing to have it back, let's find out why it
    has been avoided.


    Alastair Milne