After having to hashout the meaning of crapilly (is that a word?) written logic, I have a rather ingenious syntax proposition. Currently, most development languages (C#, Java, C++, etc.) handle compound logic conditions that define the outcome of if (and other logic flow) statements in a rather cumbersome fashion. For example, if I wanted to describe the logic condition for logic based on an integer x as “if x is equal to 7, or x is equal to 9, or x is equal to 10,” I would normally write it as:
if(x==7 || x==9 || x==10) {
//Do something…
}
Although this works (obviously, since the development community has used it over 7.3 billion times), it would be substantially more convenient to describe the condition of the statement as follows:
if(x==(7 || 9 || 10)) {
//Do something…
}
This would be logically equivalent to the first if statement, but would provide a cleaner mechanism for declaring the defining logic. There does not seem to be any loss of detail, and is equivalent to morphing the sentence “if x is equal to 7, or x is equal to 9, or x is equal to 10″ to “if x is equal to 7, or 9, or 10.”
I know, I know, it’s picky. But writing/modifying a grammar for it is quite easy (for fun: anyone want to verify that the supporting grammar for the new if statement can be written as context-free?) and every saved keystroke lengthens the amount of time to the inevitable: carpal tunnel! The only foreseeable problem is that its difficult to accommadate for it in an expression tree if it wasn’t accounted for in precompile parsing, but this is a surmountble issue. Someone please introduce this in any new, upcoming Java/C# specs…
