My first professional programming language was Perl, decades later I
still wake up in a sweat thinking about post-fix conditionals and the
'unless' conditional.
Please no.
On Mon, 2020-11-02 at 14:26 -0800, Jeffrey Paul wrote:
> Hello Gophers,
>
> There's two tiny pieces of syntactic sugar I really miss from a few
> other languages that I think would add a nice bit of ergonomics and
> convenience to Go (which I now play as my main) without increasing
> any magic or spooky action at a distance.
>
> They are:
>
> - postfix conditionals
>
> and
>
> - until (while!) and unless (if!) (which probably also means adding
> `while`)
>
> This allows for lovely expressions such as the following examples:
>
> i.NotifySomeone() if j.HasExpiredItems()
>
> time.Sleep(1 * time.Second) until thing.IsReady()
>
> b.ReportActivity(e) unless u.HasOptedOut()
>
> q.ProcessItem() while server.Active()
>
> until(time.Now().After(notAfter)) {
> // do something while we still can
> }
>
> p.processEvents() until p.shutdownRequested
>
> and, my favorite:
>
> panic("can't even") if err != nil
>
> There are, of course, various ways of doing some of this sort of
> synchronization stuff in these contrived examples using
> channels/goroutines/timers, but this sort of syntax is quite useful
> for simple straight-line synchronous code, and, in my view, increases
> readability without sacrificing anything.
>
> I know that `while` isn't a distinct thing in Go, and for
> consistency's sake, this might necessitate adding such a construct as
> well (if you can use it as a postfix conditional, you should probably
> be able to use it as `while(cond) {}` too).
>
> What do you think? I really miss this syntax from other
> languages. It's been in Perl and Ruby for ages, and, more recently,
> CoffeeScript had it for a moment, but it didn't make it over into ES
> with the other notable features from it. I think it's a lovely
> convenience without changing the operation of the language itself.
>
> Best,
> -sneak
>
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