would anyone be down for kotlin adding the ability...

# announcements

[Hullaballoonatic]

would anyone be down for kotlin adding the ability to bound an if condition like this if foobool then instead of if( foobool )? i would enjoy it for when using if and else as a ternary operator

[Shawn]

I’m not down for then, but I do like to see braces and parens removed where it makes sense

[Shawn]

swift omits parentheses in if/else conditions but instead mandates the use of braces even with single-line expressions

[Shawn]

of the two I think I prefer how Kotlin does it

[Hullaballoonatic]

it's just that other than a newline, how would the compiler know the logic that separates the condition from the blocks?

[Hullaballoonatic]

i guess it would just read the boolean then move on, but that might look confusing for readability

[Shawn]

it’d be nice if if/else let you omit parentheses when you do use braces though

[Hullaballoonatic]

older languages and low level languages like VHDL use if/then

[Czar]

if configure { false } { println("configured") } else { println("not configured")}
I think compiler would be even more confused than humans reading this

[ValV]

Interesting indeed, why is not possible for smart modern compilers to detect first statement in a branch as branch condition, e.g. if <first_statement> <second_statement> <third_statement> else <fourth_statement> adding braces where it's necessary? Where the <first_statement> is a condition, and the <third_statement>, <fourth_statement> are those which are returned as the results from the branch (as we have it)

[Czar]

It is a balancing act between compilation performance, language rules complexity, readability and I'm probably missing something else, as well.

[Hullaballoonatic]

hmmm, so i'm wondering if it would be at all possible to add infix functionality so that users could create their own if statement syntax?

[Hullaballoonatic]

i love the when syntax so much. is it more performance impacting than if? what is the drawback to always using it instead of if?