[ic] Opinions sought on [loop-next]

Webpraxis Consulting Ltd. interchange-users@interchange.redhat.com
Fri May 31 07:17:01 2002


Hi all,
I'm a newbie IC user and I've had my first experience with the [loop-next]
tag.

It came as a shock to see the whole output from the loop iteration being
suppressed. This is truly counter-intuitive compared to Perl's 'next'
command. Accordingly, there's no one-to-one equivalent. When faced with
nested loops, one is forced to use [if] constructs with the attending
stylistic complexities. Moreover, IC's way would seem to promote some
rather ugly coding practices where one could have an extensive output
sequence and then suppress it at the last stamement. I've coded in many
languages over the last thirty years and I've never seen such a coding
pragma 'til now.

I would suggest that the current [loop-next] tag be modified to behave like
its sibling, the [loop-last] tag, where one has the choice of
allowing/suppressing the loop output. Better yet, give me a straight
implementation of Perl's 'next' and 'last' commands and introduce a new
tag, say [loop-suppress], which would control only the loop's buffered
output based on some condition.

Just my $0.02 on the subject. Should my rantings strike a chord, please let
me know. I'll gladly pass on a recommendation to the IC gurus.

Cheers,
 
Yves Beaudoin, Ph.D., President,
Webpraxis Consulting Ltd.,
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, T5R 5S5
E-mail: post@webpraxis.ab.ca

Owner of the Virtual Railroad:
www.webpraxis.ab.ca/vrr/