[swift-evolution] [swift-evolution-announce] [Review] SE-0099: Restructuring Condition Clauses

[Brent Royal-Gordon]

> Thanks everyone.  FYI, Erica and I discussed it offlist and agreed to amend the proposal: now you can use semicolons or a newline to separate clauses of different types.

This change does not alter my concern about the overloading of the semicolon as a statement separator, and in fact, it introduces new ones about code formatting. Putting newlines in the middle of a compound conditional has always led to awkward questions about how deeply you should indent the conditions, the curly bracket or `else` keyword, and the contents of the block. Syntactically encouraging *every* compound conditional to use newlines, as you propose, only makes this issue worse.

I continue to believe that, however complicated it may be for the compiler, the right answer is to use `&&`, which expresses the desired semantic. Barring that, I prefer the current situation, messy as it may be, to this proposal. I simply cannot support overloading something as fundamental to the language as its statement separators (`;` and newline), even if the compiler can tell the difference. It was a mistake in the C-style for loop and it would be a mistake here as well.

-- 
Brent Royal-Gordon
Architechies