| > 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. |
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?