Re: An alternative to the "continue" statement
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- Subject: Re: An alternative to the "continue" statement
- From: David Manura <dm.lua@...>
- Date: 2008年2月28日 02:47:56 +0000 (UTC)
Fabien writes:
> [an experiment I did lets you] qualify a loop header with
> additional properties like "if", "while", "until", "for".
That seems closely related to list comprehensions:
-- List comprehension (proposed syntax
-- from http://lua-users.org/wiki/PythonLists )
t = {x*y for x=1,10 for y=1,10 if x+y >= 10}
-- For loop iterating over that list comprehension
for _,v in ipairs(t) do u[#u+1] = v end
-- Fabien's control structure (proposed syntax)
for x=1,10 for y=1,10 if x+y >= 10 do
u[#u+1] = x*y
end
The text "for x=1,10 for y=1,10 if x+y >= 10" is identical. The main difference
is that you are not building an actual list but rather invoking the code-block
for each element that would exist in such a list.
Another difference is that you add these "while" and "until" clauses for the
purpose of short-circuiting. I'm not fond of that since that makes these two
seemingly similar constructs behave differently:
-- Proposed syntax
for x=1,10 while f() do
g()
end
-- Similar standard syntax (result is quite different!)
for x=1,10 do while f() do
g()
end end
Maybe replace "while/until" with "break if":
-- Proposed syntax
for x=1,10 break if not f() do
g()
end
-- Corresponding standard syntax
for x=1,10 do if not f() then break end
g()
end
Now, if we also allow "if not f() then break end" to be re-expressed as "break
if not f()" (as in Perl), then the similarity is even more apparent:
-- Corresponding standard syntax rewritten with proposed syntax.
for x=1,10 do break if not f()
g()
end
I would recommend list comprehensions support the same syntax:
t = {x for x=1,10 break if not f()}
The "break if" has the advantage that the break is not nested (more obvious):
for x=1,10 do
local y = f()
break if not y
g(y)
end