The original Bourne shell was written in a *very* strange style of C, which shows that even in 1979, some of the original Unix greats disdained C's famed terseness & wanted _keywords_ instead of punctuation marks.
TIL it has a name: it's known as "Bournegol".
@lproven i suppose it depends, what kind of model of program structure do you want your syntactic-assembly-instructions (the { and endif and so on) to imply?
keywords imply to me
Liam Proven
ZanaGB
F4GRX Sébastien
Alex Celeste, Princess Consort of Burnoutwhile_start(); // push evaluator state
while_cond(expr);
// ... work
while_end(); // jump or pop
where keywords indicate a state-modifying instruction
braces imply to me
fnwhile(^{ return expr; }
, ^ {
// ... work
});
where control structures are syntax-time operators that accept blocks as their operands
both models have their place
personally i have come around strongly to the second because it seems more composable and abstractable (i.e. you can define "higher order" controls that take the control operator and apply blocks to it)
which is useful specifically because that's what i like to do, maybe not what others want to do
We personally love a very verbose way of laying down instructions. But then again a lot of our work is basically functional with little to no objects in place. So perhaps not as abstracted as some people. so having your BEGIN FOR, END WHILE, IF, CASE, DO, etc etc, and other, almost SQL-isms are neat.
Your first example is easy to figure out what it might be doing. your last example is pretty much just soup to our eyes (also is that a return type declaration or the variable to return at the end of the function? etc etc).
A lot of people do rave about natural language programming but honestly, just having actual readable words for what you're doing even if you're doing verbose assembly would be good. ( but, again, it is not the same to stuff some values into some registers to have a little bunny move across a 32 tile playfield than it is, temperature monitoring for blood samples or what have you)