Re: [RFC] switch expression

Hi Larry Thanks for your suggestion. I chose to use switch instead of match for a couple of reasons: 1. It uses the same AST, code generation and opcodes as the switch, I don't agree that it is significantly different than the switch that we already have. 2. Adding the match keyword is a breaking change, not an insignificant one. 3. If we can fix the switch statement semantics in the future the two will only differ in that one returns a value and the other one doesn't. This is a much smaller distinction than functions/closure. 4. If we'd every want to add pattern matching, we'd still have a keyword available to us. > I don't believe that's the case here, however. Àà™-ÒøAÐÏ > Õβ—Ùswitch is a language construct for a *statement*, which branches the flow of > control of the program. > > What you're proposing is a language construct for an *expression*, which evaluates > depending on internal logic to a different value. Well, I encourage you to look at the implementation. You'll see that the two are in fact very similar. I'm not averse to using the match keyword if people are ok with the BC change. If we do though we definitely should make it work as a statement, allow blocks in addition to single expression and also fix type coercion. This would make it a replacement of the switch statement instead of an addition. Ilija