Conditional expressions

[Tom Verhoeff]

>Peter and I are discussing the possibility of including some kind of
>conditional operator, like `foo ? bar : baz' in C. Since GPC uses
>GCC's backend, this should be easy to do semantically, the main
>question is about syntax:

I would like to propose the following syntax:

	<expr> if <cond> else <expr>

This is concise and nice (you can view "if <cond> else" as infix operator).
Disadvantage: it requires priorities/parentheses for proper binding,
it uses the if/else, which also appears in the conditional statement
(this is also an advantage, since it does not require new reserved
words/symbols).

This syntax (not the sugar) is preferred by Tony (sir C.A.R.) Hoare in

	Unifying Theories of Programming
	C.A.R. Hoare and He Jifeng
	Prentice-Hall, 1998

Hoare uses sugar with a left-pointing open triangle instead of "if"
and a right-pointing open triangle instead of else:

	( Expr1 <| Cond |> Expr2 )

I do not think this is a very "urgent" extension (but it would have
been nice if it had been taken up in some standard).

	Tom Verhoeff