[swift-evolution] ternary operator ?: suggestion

[Dennis Lysenko]

Can we just have if-expressions and Xcode indent if-statements the way that
Ruby style guides suggest?

let x = if y < 0 {
z * z - 4
} else {
8
}


Works fantastically well in Ruby, for me. Looks a bit strange to the
untrained eye but that went away for me pretty much the first time I wrote
one of these. It's:

- More readable than ternary
- Not shoehorning complex logic onto one line
- All indented to the same indentation level

And we don't have the 80-char line delimiter or length limit in Swift, with
Xcode also using a slightly smaller font size than most other IDEs, so
indentation should not be that much of an issue. Admittedly, ruby style
dictates two-space indentation which makes this type of code slightly
shallower.

On Tue, Dec 15, 2015 at 5:34 AM Al Skipp via swift-evolution <
swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:

> On 15 Dec 2015, at 06:41, Paul Ossenbruggen via swift-evolution <
> swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:
>
> Agreed, I was thinking to I really want turn something that was 2
> characters into 10 and will I really be happy with that at the end of the
> day. A properly formatted ternary can be quite easy to read, it is when
> people get sloppy and try to cram too much into one expression that they
> get really hard to follow. For example,
>
>     return (a<b) ? (b<c) ? b : (a<c) ? c : a : (a<c) ? a : (b<c) ? c : b;
>
> If formatted like this becomes easier follow the logic (at least to me):
>
> return a < b
> ? b < c
> ? b
> : a < c
> ? c
> : a
> : a < c
> ? a
> : b < c
> ? c
> : b
>
>
> I’m happy to make use of the ternary operator, but never in a nested
> fashion. It looks neat and succinct on first glance, but is quite
> impenetrable to read. I don’t think there’s a way to make such nested
> expressions easily comprehensible. Nested ‘if/else/then’ expressions will
> be equally bewildering.
>
> On a purely stylistic level I think simple, ‘if/then/else’ expressions,
> would have a more Swift vibe to them than the ternary operator. Well, that
> would be the case if it didn’t introduce the confusion between expressions
> and statements.
>
> I do still however like the Switch Expressions.
>
>
> I agree. The Switch expression proposal is worth pursuing, it’s something
> I’d really like to see in the language. One concern I have is that it faces
> the same dilemma of the ‘if’ expression proposal, that is, how to make the
> distinction between a statement and an expression unambiguous?
>
> Here’s a suggestion, it might be terrible (I’ve not had my third cup of
> tea of the morning yet), but how about a different keyword? I know, I feel
> guilty for the suggestion already, but here it is:
>
> switch == statement
> match == expression
>
> The syntax you (@Paul) have already suggested for the feature wouldn’t
> change, but instead of ‘switch’, it’d use the ‘match’ keyword for the
> expression form. Good, bad, terrible? What do people think?
>
> Al
>
>
>
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>
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