From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: Byron Rakitzis <byron@rakitzis.com>
Message-Id: <200207270243.g6R2hMc04796@rakitzis.com>
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
Subject: Re: [9fans] bug or a feature?
Date: Fri, 26 Jul 2002 19:43:22 -0700
Topicbox-Message-UUID: d4e5a90a-eaca-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025

>i'm happiest with
>
>        if foo
>                bar
>        if not
>                baz

Maybe someone can settle this for me.

I found "if not" an atrocity because it's not something lexically
scoped. This is apparently legal rc according to the grammar:

	if not foo
	if not bar
	if not baz

It's up to the interpreter to flag it as an error.

Granted there are many "runtime" as opposed to "parse" errors which
rc will flag for you, but it strikes me as singularly awful that the
control structure of the language should be one of those things.

Also, without thinking really hard about it, I'm not sure how
if not would work for nested ifs. Does this work the way you
would expect?

	if (foo) {
		stuff
		if (bar) {
			more stuff
		}
	}
	if not {
		!foo stuff
	}

A peek at the plan9 rc source suggests there is a global variable
called "ifnot" which makes me very, very nervous. But I don't run
plan9 at home so I can't test this code sample. What if foo is true
and bar is false?

TD was justifiably proud of rc's yacc grammar -- I suppose I felt I
was doing it one better by bringing "if .. else" under that umbrella
also.

Byron.