Re: Replacing the "if" statement with an "if" expression which supersedes it

Le 27/06/2026 à 17:37, Federico Ferri a écrit :
> The use of x and y or z is good only for selected trivial cases.
> However nothing prevents you to write a more robust helper:
>
> function _if(cond, _then, _else)
>     if cond then return _then else return _else end
> end
>
> print(_if(10 < 11, 'yes', 'no')) -- yes
> print(_if(10 < 11, false, 0)) -- false
The problem is that this eagerly evaluates boh the _then and the _else.

It costs performance, but more importantly if there are effects, the effects of both branches are executed.


> But, to be honest, I'd like Lua to provide a mechanism to allow me write *better* syntax sugar which would allow me to solve 100 different problems, rather than just one solution to one problem (the ternary operator) which is a nice to have, but it may or may not fit the minimalistic design of Lua.
The conditional is a very fundamental notion in programming, and there is a fundamental flaw in not having an expression conditional.
I'm trying to deal with this.

I do think that it will solve more many problems to have a clean conditional expression.

So… you basically want to allow programs to introduce new syntax? Wouldn't something like user-defined mixfix operators be the minimum necessary to achieve this satisfactorily?

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