Re: Opinions about conditional built-in names?

On 6/1/15 3:26 PM, Daniel Dekany wrote:
> Sunday, May 31, 2015, 7:50:20 PM, Woonsan Ko wrote:
> 
>> I personally prefer having the default value option inside the
>> parenthesis, without having to depend on the default value after '!'.
>> So, I like the idea the odd number of parameters for a default value.
>>
>> Regarding the original question about 'switch' and 'choose', I like the
>> 'switch' very much, but I'm not sure if 'choose' is a good name for
>> ternary operator. In XSL, 'choose' means just one choice of the
>> 'switch'.
> 
> Actually, in XSLT "choose" stands for "switch" (and "when" stands for
> "case"). But that just proves how confusing this word is... :)

Oh you're right. Long time passed after I wrote XSL files last. :-D

> 
>> 'choose' sounds like related to one of the 'multiple' choices
>> to me.
> 
> Well, I'm also unhappy with "choose", I just couldn't find better
> yet... What do you think about "then". Apart from the lack of "else"
> in it, it reads quite fluently: loggedIn?then(user.name, "unknown").

Yeah, "then" sounds better to me than anything else.

> 
>> Another option to consider might be 'iif' [1], which seems a bit clearer
>> to me than 'either' and others.
>>
>>     someBoolean?iif(whenTrue, whenFalse)
>>
>> Just my two cents,
> 
> I have played that idea back then, but I'm afraid very few knows what
> does "iif" stands for. Also loggedIn?iif(user.name, "unknown") can be
> easily misread like: we are logged in IF user.name is "unknown".

Agreed. Not sound fluent.

Kind regards,

Woonsan

> 
>> Woonsan
>>
>> [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IIf
>>
>> On 5/30/15 6:02 AM, Daniel Dekany wrote:
>>> And regarding the semantics of ?switch... as it sands now, if there's
>>> no matching choice, that will be an exception that says:
>>>
>>>   The value before ?switch(case1, value1, case2, value2, ...) didn't
>>>   match any of the case parameters, and there was no default value
>>>   parameter (an additional last parameter) either.
>>>
>>> So, if you have an odd number of parameters, then the last one is like
>>> the default branch of switch in Java.
>>>
>>> I have also considered just returning null if there's no match, and
>>> then one can write ?switch(...)!theDefault, but then if someone
>>> doesn't give a default, the error messages will just say that
>>> ?switch(...) has evaluated to null/missing, which many users won't
>>> understand why's happening. Also it has the same problems as
>>> ?then(this)!that had.
>>>
>>
>>
> 


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