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Date:	Tue, 4 Mar 1997 09:57:32 -0500
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From:	"Mark K. Gardner" <mkgardne@cs.uiuc.edu>
To:	rc@hawkwind.utcs.toronto.edu
Subject: if Suggestion
Reply-to: mkgardne@cs.uiuc.edu

Since Byron is beginning work on a new official version of RC, I would
like to make a suggestion about the if statement.

One of the things which attracted me to RC initially was its "more
C-like syntax than csh". However, I find myself wanting to have an
optional else-if clause in the if statement. I realize that there are
other ways of expressing the same control flow, but either they look
very cumbersome to me (nested if statements) or I get lost in
complexity of expressions connected by && and ||. Is it heresy to
suggest that we add an optional else-if to the if statement? I am not
opposed to the keyword "elsif" (as used in several other languages) to
avoid the dangling else problem. (There goes the likeness to C!)

-- 
Mark K. Gardner (mkgardne@cs.uiuc.edu)
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Real-Time Systems Laboratory
--