[cinger]

do you know of any languages that have a sort of inverted switch statement to clean up a list of if statements like this?

something like:

    invswitch err !=nil {
    case 'err := binary.Write(w, binary.LittleEndian, int32(len(g.Name)))': return err
    case _, err = w.Write([]byte(g.Name)): return err
    case err = binary.Write(w, binary.LittleEndian, g.Age): return err
    default: return binary.Write(w, binary.LittleEndian, g.FurColor)
    }

[stass]

Yes, CPS is essentially that and available in any modern language, or can be emuated by setcontext(2)/getcontext(2). However, it can become a mess very quickly.

Another option is monadic style, which will pass error checking along. I believe it will work well for this example, and can be implemented in Go, most likely (I don't know Go, bur it seems so).

Of course, the real problem with this code is that it is not decomposed properly. Nested error checking is the first sign of it, as somebody else already rightfully noted in the thread.

[pcwalton]

I think you'd probably need generics to implement monadic chaining in Go.

[pcwalton]

This is similar to what Haskell do-notation provides.