Named Blocks (Was Re: Oh noooooo!!)

[Wm E Davidsen Jr]

In article <475 at thirdi.UUCP>, peter at thirdi.UUCP (Peter Rowell) writes:

|  One thing I would have loved to have seen introduced by ANSI would have
|  been "named blocks", but I am sure that parsing them is a bitch.

|  Given this "improvement", the above might have been written:
|  
|      while(rule = (Rule*)Queue_iter_next(&rule_iter)) { "outer loop"
|  	while(rsym = (Symbol*)Queue_iter_next(&rsym_iter)) { "inner loop"

  I think the idea of naming the loop rather than the block, as
suggested earlier, would be easier to parse.

Ex:
  while loop1 (a < b) {
    while (b = foo(2)) {
      /* stuff here */
      if (m > 20) continue loop1; /* specifies the scope of the loop */
    }
    /* this is where 'continue loop1' transfers */
  }

Disclamer: this is not my idea, and I am not offering an opinion on
including it in the language. I think discussion of these features is a
good way to have the major pitfalls discovered before someone has
implemented them.
-- 
bill davidsen	(davidsen at crdos1.crd.GE.COM -or- uunet!crdgw1!crdos1!davidsen)
"The world is filled with fools. They blindly follow their so-called
'reason' in the face of the church and common sense. Any fool can see
that the world is flat!" - anon