Re: Pronouns in programming language?

Carles Blas Anglada <carles.blas@uab.es> schrieb in im Newsbeitrag:
> In your example there is an elegant
> construction that answers that question: switch.
>
> switch (variable_with_long_name)
> case 2: do_this; break;
> case 3: do_that;


Pascal has


    with <some path expression that returns a struct lvalue> do
    begin
        <some statements where struct members can be
        accessed without repeating the above path expression>
    end


BTW this is related to variable binding with call-by-reference
parameters:


    procedure do_something (var foo: whatever)
    (* People with a C background, assume 'whatever *foo'. *)
    begin
        ...
    end


    do_something (some-exceedingly-long-path-expression)


Call-by-reference is probably the reason why most languages don't have
pronouns. Call-by-reference is much less dependent on context, i.e.
rearranging statements or even nesting doesn't inadvertently affect the
meaning of a call-by-reference parameter, while the mechanisms listed so
far in this group are all sensitive to such changes. Of course, if you
write a procedure just to get rid of some exceedingly long path name,
you there's a syntactic overhead to pay, and more than what the other
mechanisms require.


Regards,
Joachim

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