[swift-evolution] C-style For Loops

[Johan Jensen]

Well, it is possible to just add an extra scope around the variable and the
loop:

do {
    var i = 0
    while i < 10 {
        print(i)
        i += 1
    }
}

—Johan

On Sun, Dec 6, 2015 at 10:13 PM, Tyler Fleming Cloutier via swift-evolution
<swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:

>
> *Lowered Readability and Maintainability*
>
> I have aesthetic reasons for disliking the for-loop. The C-style loop is
> harder to read especially for those not coming from C-style languages,
> easier to mess up at edge conditions, and is commonly used for side-effects
> which, in a language focused on safety, is not a feature to be encouraged.
>
> For example, one side effect that was mentioned on-list yesterday was the
> incrementor, which is guaranteed in C-style to execute late:
> Roland King writes:
>
>
> for var floatingThing = start ; floatingThing <= end ; floatingThing +=
> delta
> {
> // more than a few lines of code with early escape continues
> }
>
> shows intent of the loop very clearly, start, condition and increment all
> together at the top, and however you loop you always execute the increment
> part of the statement. Convert that to a while(), if you have a continue in
> the body, you have a good chance of not incrementing at all, or duplicating
> the increment code before every continue. So you can’t always nicely turn
> for into while. I second the point below about the loop variable being
> local to the for as well, I also like that.
>
> Late incrementor management is a feature that can be mimicked with defer,
> as pointed out by several other list members.
>
>
>
> Defer wouldn’t accomplish the exact same behavior because it would run if
> an exception was thrown, which is not the same as the last clause of a for
> loop, but perhaps is close enough.
>
> The only other concern I would have is not being able to scope my
> variables to the loop. I didn’t see it addressed, but perhaps its not very
> important in the end anyway.
>
> Something like the following might be nice to scope the variable
> exclusively to the loop.
>
> for var x = 0 while (someCondition()) {
> // code
> }
>
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