Timeline for If there's no problem treating a statement as an expression, why was there a distinction in the first place in some programming languages?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
3 events
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| Aug 22, 2014 at 8:56 | comment | added | mouviciel |
@delnan - You are correct. In my mind an assignement is a statement, not an expression, i.e., let a take the current value of b, without the second part: and return that value.
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| Aug 22, 2014 at 8:24 | comment | added | user7043 |
A distinction between expressions and statements doesn't necessarily help with if (a = b), as long as assignment is an expression (it's one in Java and C# which address this problem through other means). Making assignment a statement would help, but equally well one can restrict if to boolean values (Java, C#) and in a expression-oriented language, additionally make it the moral equivalent of a "statement": An expression that returns the unit type (), which is what Rust does.
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| Aug 22, 2014 at 7:39 | history | answered | mouviciel | CC BY-SA 3.0 |