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Re: expressions vs. statements



At 07:29 PM 12/18/2001, Michael Vanier wrote:

>> Date: Tue, 18 Dec 2001 15:45:15 -0800 (PST)
>> From: Paul Graham <paulgraham@yahoo.com>
>> 
>> This is actually a question people on this list might
>> have interesting opinions about.  Does distinguishing 
>> between expressions and statements buy you anything in 
>> expressive power?  I have often wondered about what
>> the point of this distinction was...
>> 

I've been very happy with just expressions in my language.

However, i've also had a sequential form like (begin) in Scheme, (progn) is Lisp, or (do) in Arc which let you side effect and return a value.  

Common Lisp function bodies had implicit tag blocks (sic?) where you could (return) a value for the function from some point in another control structure.  This might give you Perl-like compact idioms, but I haven't missed such implicit combinations of control in Scheme. I can extend the syntax myself when i find such things essential, which hasn't been often.

k