On 10/15/2010 7:51 PM, nemesis wrote:
> Orchid XP v8<voi### [at] devnull>  wrote:
>> Oh wow. 42 years later, it still exists:
>>
>> http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd02xx/EWD215.PDF
>>
>> "Go to considered harmful."
>
> a classic!  I'm glad you've been interested in the evolution of programming
> formalisms -- and all by yourself!  Next on, the lambda papers! ;)
>
>> I also note, with some interest, what looks suspiciously like Haskell
>> syntax, in a letter typed 42 years ago. Obviously it's not after
>> Haskell, but rather whatever mathematical formalism Haskell borrowed the
>> notation from. Still, interesting none the less...)
>
> bwahahahaha
>
> you must be talking about `conditional expressions as introduced by J.McCarthy
> ("B1 ->  E1, B2 ->  E2,....., Bn ->  En")'... although it looks like currying
> haskell notation, it's actually what it's told:  John McCarthy's conditional
> expressions for Lisp!
>
> (cond
>    ((null? ls) 0)
>    ((zero? (car ls)) 0)
>    (#t (/ n (car ls))))
>
> cond was blowderized and adapted to all other programming languages in the
> simplified form if-then-else... even Lisp provides it as well as cond!
>
>
Snort.. While the above is slightly annoying (though only due to the 
fact that I prefer a syntax which is marginally clearer, if only just.., 
claiming that if-then-else is simpler is just flat wrong. Lot of extra 
typing to get you where you are going, when something closer to the 
original, like one languages 'switch' statement makes a lot more sense. 
But, it only gets worse when some joker does what was done in a few 
versions of basic (Apple Basic being one of them), and lost the else, or 
denied use of more than one else, by disallowing 'else if', etc.

Definitely times when I seriously *hate* if-then-else, even if the 
result is, theoretically, the same.

-- 
void main () {

     if version = "Vista" {
       call slow_by_half();
       call DRM_everything();
     }
     call functional_code();
   }
   else
     call crash_windows();
}

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