this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2023
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Programming
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As someone learning c# right now, can we get some of those "modern ergonomics" for switch statements 💀
I cant believe it works the way it does. "Fallthrough logic is a dumb footgun, so those have to be explicit rather than the default. But C programmers might get confused somehow, so break has to be explicit too"
I miss fallthrough logic in languages that dont have it, and the "goto case" feature is really sick but like... Cmon, there's clearly a correct way here and it isnt "there is no default behavior"
I’m not sure I understand your point about fall through having to be explicit, but I agree that switch statements are lacking ergonomics - which makes some sense considering they were added a looooong time ago. Luckily, they added recently the switch expression, which uses pattern matching and behaves more like Rust’s Match expression. It’s still lacking proper exhuastiveness checks for now, but that’s a problem with the core design of composition in C#’s type model and one they are looking to solve (alongside Discriminate Unions in all likelihood).
As far as i understand it, every switch statement requires a
breakotherwise it's a compiler error - which makes sense from the "fallthrough is a footgun" C perspective. But fallthrough isnt the implicit behavior in C# like it is in C - the absence of abreakwouldnt fall through, even if it wasnt a compiler error. Fallthrough only happens when you explicitly usegoto.But
breakis what you want 99% of the time, and fallthrough is explicit. So why doesbreakalso need to be explicit? Why isnt it just the default behavior when there's nothing at the end of the case?It's like saying "my hammer that's on fire isnt safe, so you're required to wear oven mitts when hammering" instead of just... producing a hammer that's not on fire.
From what i saw on the internet, the justification (from MS) was literally "c programmers will be confused if they dont have to put breaks at the end".
Ah ok I think I get you now. To be clear, fall through is implicit - when the case being fallen through is empty. I forgot that, if you want to execute some statements in one case, and then go to another case, you need gotos. To be fair, I’ve never needed that behavior before.
I absolutely see your point on break not being the default. It is sad, although I will say I don’t mind a little extra explicitness in code I’m sharing with a large team.