(tye)Re3: crafting a decent CLI

[tye]

That is what if( EXPR ) { EXPR; EXPR } is for. So, no, I don't consider that a sensible use of do.

        - tye (but my friends call me "Tye")

[Abigail]

The point isn't that you find it sensible or not. The point was how easy it was for others to parse your code. You weren't assuming I had to parse the bare block I wrote to see whether it's used as a multi-pass loop, do you? I wrote it, so I know.

If you want to get into style discussions, that's fine, but don't come with arguments "oh, I don't find it sensible so don't apply my arguments on my code".

-- Abigail

[tye]

I'm pretty sure I've never seen "do { ... } if ...;" or similar. That is so pointlessly obfuscated that it is something I would avoid (such as in a coding standard) even more than I would avoid bare blocks as loops (which I also find can always be replaced with better alternatives). So I still jump to "loop" when I see ";\ndo {\n" and I will continue to. I also still don't jump to "loop" when I see a lone open bracket (and nobody should since most of the time they'd be wrong anyway).

So a do loop is clearer than a bare block "loop". True, there is no guarantee against somebody writing something that clearly looks like a loop but is in fact an unclear and uselessly obfuscated non-loop. That isn't a concern when trying to decide how to make code easy to maintain. If you've got "do { ... } if ...;" in your code, then you've got worse problems to deal with first.