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Re: expressions vs. statements
Paul Graham wrote:
>
> 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...
Languages which distinguish between the two (and prohibit one using
them interchangably) have problems when you attempt to write macros
and higher-order functions. You end up having to write two forms of
*everything*: the statement and the expression version.
Consider C where a common idiom is
do { <statement>;} while (0)
to turn a statement into an expression.