[pron]

> Both forms feature "implicit flow of control", contrary to Zig's stated goals.

They absolutely don't. All control paths are explicitly represented by syntax (no different from the hidden goto in a while loop -- it's explicitly recognised by the while syntax); proof: you can draw all of them by just examining the syntax of the current subroutine, while knowing nothing about others. Exceptions, however, are implicit: any call, foo(), might or might not cause some control flow change in the client without there being any explicit acknowledgement of that by the client; you cannot draw all the flow paths just by examining the syntax of the current subroutine.

[pfalcon]

Sorry, but throwing an exception in a function call is equivalent to:

    res, exc = fun();
    if (exc) goto exception_handler;

That's underlying model of how exceptions behave, and how they're implemented "manually" in languages with no exception handling (C, Go). You absolutely can draw that by examining syntax of a subroutine, and it's no more implicit than "defer".

[pron]

Right, both the C style and Zig's defer are explicit, as opposed to exceptions, which are implicit, only Zig's error handling is less error-prone (it forces you to handle errors) and makes the code more readable, IMO, than the C style.

[pfalcon]

But no, there's a kind of continuum, and Go/Zig "defer" is already pretty high towards "implicit flow of control" end. (I agree that exceptions are a notch higher.)

It's only C's syntax which is truly explicit. It's literally a structured machine-independent assembler. That's why it's gold language which is very hard to displace (it's already perfect for what it is). But just as everyone I'm watching with popcorn all the contenders popping up. (My humble opinion about Zig's issues on that path, I, together with other people, expressed here.)

[pron]

> is already pretty high towards "implicit flow of control" end

Its implicitness is zero -- there is zero information not available in the syntax of the current block, exactly as in C -- so I don't see how it can be high compared to anything. You just don't have it in C, so you're not used to it. This is exactly like an Assembly programmer who says that C's `while` is implicit because there is no explicit jmp. In fact, the third clause in C's `for` header works almost exactly like defer: you write a piece of code that isn't executed immediately after the preceding one, but is injected to the end of the block.

A language with `while` isn't any more implicit than a language with just goto; it just has another explicit control-flow construct. Same goes for defer.

> It's literally a structured machine-independent assembler.

Not so much once you take the preprocessor into account.

> it's already perfect for what it is

I think that was true in 1970, not today. First, we know more. Second, we write much bigger programs. Third, "structured assembly" isn't as valuable as it was now that even machine code is "high level." This is not to say that C could be replaced everywhere, but I think, intertia aside, it could be replaced almost everywhere.

[pfalcon]

> Its implicitness is zero -- there is zero information not available in the syntax of the current block

Ah, so your mind's window is single block, that what you bang on. You know, blocks can be long too. To the end of reading 1000-line block, you think that you know how it ends. But oops, you completely forgot about some "defer", which implicitly executes at the end of block. That's my definition of "true explicitness", where all code which executes at some point is available locally.

And if you forgo that definition of explicitness, why stop at block? Exceptions work across blocks, i.e. on the level of the entire subroutine, and not much harder to reason about than "defer".

> In fact, the third clause in C's `for` header works almost exactly like defer

Good point. It's a clause in "for", so best practice is to use it for "loop iteration expression". It's also familiar syntax to the entire generations of programmers. Unlike Zig's "2nd clause in while" which is "original design" people will "thank" you for.

> it could be replaced almost everywhere.

The question is with what. IMHO, Zig isn't good enough to replace C at all. Too much NIH, again. It does too much differently. Naive thinking is of course "so that it's better", but actually, it just repeats C's mistakes (ugliness in language) and makes its own, "very original" ones.

[pron]

> That's my definition of "true explicitness", where all code which executes at some point is available locally.

But no control flow construct satisfies that. Jumps are the whole point, and the unit for structured control flow is the block (what's the next instruction after `break`, `continue` or `}`?). defer is just as structured, just as local, and just as explicit as C's control flow constructs.

> It's also familiar syntax to the entire generations of programmers.

True, but learning Zig takes a day; two tops. Where it differs in syntax from C, it does so for good reason, and it's not like it's a complex language where different syntax is an additional burden. C's `for` syntax just doesn't make sense (`;`, which everywhere else in the language denotes sequential composition, means something different in the `for` header). Is an additional 2 minutes of learning, in a language that has very little syntax, not worth fixing something that's unpleasant in C?