this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2023
39 points (93.3% liked)
Programming
17313 readers
558 users here now
Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!
Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.
Hope you enjoy the instance!
Rules
Rules
- Follow the programming.dev instance rules
- Keep content related to programming in some way
- If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos
Wormhole
Follow the wormhole through a path of communities [email protected]
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I’m not sure I understand your point about fall through having to be explicit, but I agree that switch statements are lacking ergonomics - which makes some sense considering they were added a looooong time ago. Luckily, they added recently the switch expression, which uses pattern matching and behaves more like Rust’s Match expression. It’s still lacking proper exhuastiveness checks for now, but that’s a problem with the core design of composition in C#’s type model and one they are looking to solve (alongside Discriminate Unions in all likelihood).
As far as i understand it, every switch statement requires a
breakotherwise it's a compiler error - which makes sense from the "fallthrough is a footgun" C perspective. But fallthrough isnt the implicit behavior in C# like it is in C - the absence of abreakwouldnt fall through, even if it wasnt a compiler error. Fallthrough only happens when you explicitly usegoto.But
breakis what you want 99% of the time, and fallthrough is explicit. So why doesbreakalso need to be explicit? Why isnt it just the default behavior when there's nothing at the end of the case?It's like saying "my hammer that's on fire isnt safe, so you're required to wear oven mitts when hammering" instead of just... producing a hammer that's not on fire.
From what i saw on the internet, the justification (from MS) was literally "c programmers will be confused if they dont have to put breaks at the end".
Ah ok I think I get you now. To be clear, fall through is implicit - when the case being fallen through is empty. I forgot that, if you want to execute some statements in one case, and then go to another case, you need gotos. To be fair, I’ve never needed that behavior before.
I absolutely see your point on break not being the default. It is sad, although I will say I don’t mind a little extra explicitness in code I’m sharing with a large team.
That's even worse... why isnt an empty case a syntax error?